Facebook’s organic reach has had a very slow death over the last couple of years. This is due to Facebook making an astonishing announcement.
When launching a post, sadly, business owners will no longer be able to reach all of their fans. As a matter of fact, no other form of content either! How nice is this….! Why you should not solely rely on Facebook’s organic reach for your business…? Allow us to walk a road with you, read below!
I think I speak for a lot of us when I say, personally, this made me extremely angry!!!
After I spent more than 4 years building up my Learning Tree Facebook business page, growing it to over 14,000 fans…
Facebook drops the organic reach bomb!
I had to calm down. Above all, I was going to give myself a heart attack. I had to step back and think of a new strategy.
This helped me realize, that not all was lost. Even though I was fully ready to unleash my 4 years’ worth of bottled-up anger on Facebook.
So, if you are still in the anger stage, I have good news for you. I’m going to share some important stats with you and show you how to get around this problem.
Overview of Facebook’s Organic Reach
I’m going to share some important stats with you and show you a new strategy which is basically the only way forward for anyone who wants to survive this major Facebook change.
After pulling some data from The Learning Tree’s Facebook page, I started searching online for possible reasons why my 14,000 Facebook fans were not responding as much as they used to.
Facebook’s organic reach slowly dying
I kept wondering what was going on, and why was my Facebook organic reach dead.
My findings were shocking…
The biggest shock wasn’t even how much it had dropped over time, the big shocker came in when I realized how quickly my Facebook organic reach had died!
See the diagram below, and notice how the stats on Facebook’s worldwide organic reach have declined over time.
Can you believe this?
I almost fell off my office chair the day I discovered this!
Could Facebook not have told us?
I paid Facebook to promote my Facebook business page, to help me gain fans, and for them to suddenly do this, was so unfair!
So, believe me when I say, “I feel your pain”!
Let me give you a proper example in the form of a case study on just how badly this affected my business.
The Learning Tree case study of Facebook’s organic reach
We would run 2 – 4 campaigns a week, posting top-of-the-game, engaging content, on our Facebook business page to all of our 14,000 fans, we had about 40% interaction with our content.
This meant that 1 post would get about 2 000 – 5 000 people viewing our content, as well as engaging with our content.
After Facebook’s organic reach started to decline, we found that over a period of about 2 – 4 years, we went from 60% organic reach to a shocking 2 – 5% reach!
Crazy right?!?!
Now, when we post to all 14,000 people, we only get 180 people who view our time-consuming custom-made content and only about 10 – 14 people who actually engage in it.
Below, I have taken a screenshot of an organic post that we launched on The Learning Tree Facebook page.
You can see that the page has over 14,000 fans, and the post that was launched to all those fans, only 322 fans got to see it, and only 5 fans liked it.
How disappointing right?
This is not due to it being a bad post, Facebook has just decided that only a small percentage of our fans can see it, and we need to pay to have the rest of them see it. As simple as that.
This is absolutely shocking!!!
Getting around the Facebook organic reach problem
Unfortunately, there is very little you as a business owner can do to increase Facebook’s organic reach to the same results that you used to get.
I don’t want you to think that I am bashful towards Facebook, I am just very disappointed in the way they have done things with the organic reach.
Let’s look at two Facebook organic reach options
The two options we have, are to create extremely powerful and engaging content, to try and get your existing fans to share the content, and the other, is to go after paid advertising on Facebook.
We have dedicated 90% of all our time and resources to paid advertising, and put Facebook’s organic reach on the back burner – I will explain to you why a bit later.
Increase engagement on your Facebook business page organically
Now that Facebook has totally shut us down from reaching all of our fans on our page, I can somehow understand why they have done this, but I will fill you in on the secret another day, in another blog post.
But, one thing that I can say is…
My personal thoughts about why Facebook has done this is possible to force us business owners into creating better content, that is more shareable and engaging for the end-user (client).
Below, I have listed a few ideas that you can use for content that is a lot more engaging and could up your Facebook organic reach game, that’s if you don’t want to go the Facebook paid road:
- Ask for advice
- Content post
- Run a poll
- Share poll results
- Inspirational quotes
- Fill in the blank
- Follow Friday
- Seasonal posts
- Blog posts
- Fan-only discount
I have created a whole blog post on the best Facebook engagement content, that you could use for your business, click here to read more about each of these tools and how to best use them.
Facebook’s paid advertising, and how this could be the solution
If you are still here, and reading this post, then thank you very much.
If you have learnt something and found it interesting, feel free to share this. Family, friends, or teams, could also be encouraged.
So next, let’s have a look at Facebook paid advertising, and how this could be the ultimate solution to your Facebook organic reach problem.
If you don’t know what Facebook Paid Advertising is about, then I would recommend clicking here to read more about this function that Facebook has.
So, by now, we have established that Facebook’s organic reach is dead, and we don’t want to wait around till we have a million Facebook followers before we can get some form of traction and engagement…
This is why Facebook ads would more than likely be your best solution.
Facebook paid advertising is also known as Facebook Ads or Facebook PPC (Pay-Per-click)
Don’t freak out!
How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?
Facebook is the world’s cheapest advertising platform and has the best reach, which actually gets you past the dead organic reach side of things, yes you have to pay, but I promise you it’s worth it.
When creating your Facebook campaigns, you will be prompted, with various questions. One of them asked how much you would like to spend per day on your campaign.
Working our your Facebook ad budget
I recommend splitting your marketing budget into 30 days, ask yourself what you could afford per day.
I start my Facebook campaigns off with a very small budget of R 50 – R 100 per day. From there on, I scale it up.
Knowing when to scale Facebook ads
When I start to see it’s working for me, I will improve my Facebook ad campaign. How will I know this, you are asking? The data will show that I am reaching X (my goal) amount of people per day.
Your data is everything when it comes to online digital marketing and Facebook advertising. I recommend that you learn how to read your data like a pro. In addition, before scaling up your marketing spending on your campaigns.
So, the bottom line is, what does it cost to advertise on Facebook…
You can spend as little as R 10 per day. Or, all the way up to R 1 000 and more per day, it’s based on your budget.
It really is up to you how much you want to spend…
The more you spend, the larger your reach is, and the more traction you will get using Facebook advertising.
The bottom line of this story is…
Yes, Facebook organic is dead, unless you have a million followers on your Facebook business page, you are not going to get much movement and engagement anymore.
It’s time to start thinking about Facebook paid advertising as your new best friend
I also don’t want you to think that you need to ”break” the bank to advertise on Facebook. It is cheap. I encourage you to give it a try for at least 30 days and let the results speak for themselves.
So, here is your challenge…
If you are serious about growing your business, then don’t wait any longer.
Start today, by unlocking millions of leads for your business, they are there just do it, and yes, you can have them!
If you need assistance please contact us by clicking here.
