Facebook Kills Off Organic ReachTHOMAS HAYNES. FEB 2015.

The Problem

“ T h e av e ra g e p o s t b y a B ra n d o n Fa c e b o o k i s o n l y s e e n b y 2 % o f t h a t B ra n d ’s fo l l o w e r s .”

Says Who?Ogilvy analysed more than 100 Brand pages and found that their reach had dropped significantly (link).

Really?Yes. Facebook admitted that organic reach is dropping:

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Organic-Reach-on-Facebook

They also explained that they are “reducing overly promotional page posts in News Feed”:

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/11/news-feed-fyi-reducing-overly-promotional-page-posts-in-news-feed/

What Does This Mean?The days of being able to drive significant amounts of traffic to your site, engage with your audience or promote your business for free on Facebook are over.

Officially this is about Facebook putting the interests of users over the interests of businesses (yeah right).

How to tell if this has affected your pageLook at recent posts to your Brand page under “insights” to see the reach of these posts.

Reach is a measurement of how many people saw your post.

Example reach statsThe image below shows a normal post and one boosted (more on that later) with a budget of about £20.

The “organic” post reached 65 people compared to 12.7k for the boosted post.

Is your current strategy working?Review your reach figures (and, more importantly, engagement).

What are you trying to achieve and how are you measuring it? For example: views, engagement, likes, sales.

Is the amount of time you’re spending on your Facebook strategy providing a positive ROI?

[I couldn’t bear to add a cheesy ROI graphic here]

The solutionIf you’re not getting the results you want from your current FB activity you have two choices:

1. Stop using Facebook for your Brand.

2. Start thinking of Facebook as a paid medium.

Me again!

Boosting postsThere are two main ways to advertise on Facebook – creating an advert (we’ll save that for another day) or boosting a post:

1. Write a post as you normally would and then click on “boost post”

2. Choose an audience

3. Choose a budget and a duration

4. Let Facebook do the rest

Best practiceThe more targeted you can be the higher your success rate is likely to be.

Even if you’re just looking to increase brand awareness you should be using the Audience feature to target people who match your target personas.

Test, measure, analyse and test again.

Good Luck!GET IN TOUCH IF YOU GET STUCK

LinksThis presentation in Blog form http://www.optix.solutions.co.uk/blog/facebook-kills-off-organic-reach-2015/

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Email me Thomas@optixsolutions.co.uk