“What happened to my reach on Facebook?” is a common questions we get here at The Rocket Group. Whether it is emailed or spoken directly to us there are usually a few more exclamation points than question marks in it. The broad answer is, “Facebook happened to your reach.”
The honest answer is, “Quit worrying about your reach on Facebook.” More about this in a moment. TWEET THIS
Research has shown that Facebook started making adjustments to its algorithm in December, 2013 which dramatically impacted organic reach of Facebook posts. In the months since then we have seen some accounts with organic (non-paid, non-shared, non-interactive) reach other their content as low as 1{1ccf3f7051f621f207bf0b5abe66fecd9fcbebd6ccca57cd81eaf6422f6a0a70} of their fan base. Facebook did all of this with the goal of creating a richer user experience for its 1.2 billion account holders.
And to make money for itself and its investors.
Even the big boys of Facebook marketing are having trouble. Walmart and Disney, with a combined 80 million Likes , are having trouble breaking 1{1ccf3f7051f621f207bf0b5abe66fecd9fcbebd6ccca57cd81eaf6422f6a0a70} engagement rates of their content. Their troubles lead us to a couple of conclusions.
Content Matters
Your content should be engaging, inviting, and informative to your audience. With large audiences like the two mentioned above or smaller audiences, which is what you probably have if you are reading this, you can’t be selling all the time. Look at the content on the two Facebook pages of Walmart and Disney. The majority of the posts are about deals, products, or special offers. Selling all the time on social media does not lead to audience interaction. TWEET THIS
Monitor Your Audience
Facebook gives you almost all of the tools you will need, unless your audience is in the millions, to monitor your audience and your content in their Insights tool. With this tool you can see who your Facebook audience actually is in age, gender, and location as well as know what time they are on the platform, what types of your content they interact with the most, and how many times your content has been hidden or reported to Facebook. If you aren’t reviewing Insights at least once a week, you are doing Facebook wrong.
Prepare to Pay
If you want to truly reach your audience of Likers, or folks similar to them, you will need to pay to do so. The Facebook advertising tool is one of the most powerful applications in marketing. For very affordable rates, you can reach more of your audience, Facebook users who match the demographics of your audience or customer profile, or anyone in the world if you know enough about them. We have run successful client ad projects on Facebook which have grown sales, audience numbers, and brand recognition for dozens of dollars a month. The self-serve ad tool is powerful and effective but there are deeper tools available like Power Editor which are more robust and useful.
So why shouldn’t you care about reach? Because, despite popular belief, no page ever reached all of its fans with any one post. Not even Facebook’s own page posts reach all 1.2 billion users. Many factors make this so: fans not being online, the limited shelf life of a Facebook post, and your content not being interesting.
What you should focus on is creating relevant content which the members of your audience who do see it when posted will interact with it. Your interaction numbers are the ones you should be looking at: Shares, comments, even Likes. The more of these you earn the better the reach of your content.
As always, feel free to reach out to us anytime if you would like to have a deeper conversation about this topic or anything else regarding the marketing of your business, organization, or campaign.
See Also:
2 Facebook Page Changes You Should Be Aware Of
