01 Mar What’s Going on with Facebook’s Organic Reach?
Social media marketers have been battling against the downward trend of organic reach since 2013 when Facebook began limiting the visibility of content in the news feed. These days, you are lucky if you get above 3% reach on your organic content. Additionally, recent algorithm changes and announcements have made many people question if Facebook organic reach is still alive.
Facebook Announcements Effecting Reach
In mid-January, Facebook updated their algorithm to encourage more meaningful interactions between people and less passive interactions with brands and businesses. This put a lot of brands on edge because of the ambiguity of how exactly this would all play out. With these changes we expected that Pages would likely see a decline in their organic reach, referral traffic, and total video watch time. However, posts that lead to more meaningful interactions would see less of an impact. We continued to encourage brands to focus on generating meaningful engagements that inspire conversation and interactions to combat some of the changes.
Another update made this month is that Facebook is only counting viewable organic impressions. Facebook said they were going to do this a while ago, but it is finally going into effect. This new methodology for organic reach matches how Facebook already counts reach for ads. Facebook will report two versions of Page posts’ organic reach: one using the old methodology and one using the new, viewable-only methodology. Eventually, they will report only the viewable count.
Is Organic Reach Still Alive?
A lot of social media marketers are asking themselves the question—is organic reach still alive? As those who focus our efforts in social media marketing and with the ability to see across a variety of industries, we are constantly monitoring shifts and changes that we see. We analyzed 6,500 posts from more than 25 Facebook pages to look at the latest impact on organic reach. You may be surprised by our findings. If you are curious on learning more, check out our white paper on the subject.
What are your thoughts on if Facebook organic reach is alive or dead?
