If you've been doing Facebook marketing for your business, then you might have heard of a concept called 'organic reach'.
But what is organic reach on Facebook, and why does it matter?
In this post, I'm going to cover more information about Facebook organic reach and why it's important, as well as show you ten effective (and mostly FREE) ways to get more of it for your business.
Let's start first by establishing what organic reach is.
Long story short, Facebook doesn't show your content (e.g. videos or posts) to everyone who follows your page. Let's say you've got 1000 likes on your page ... you might be lucky to have 100 people see an average post that you make.
Your organic reach is therefore the number of people who see your content that you post, for whom you don't pay for any advertising/post boosting.
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The problem is that organic reach has been decreasing steadily for years now. What this means for you is that it's getting harder and harder to get your business seen on Facebook for free (without needing to pay for ads or post boosts).
There are a few reasons for this, but the key points are as follows:
- Facebook ultimately wants you to 'pay to play' on their platform. If you are trying to promote your business, they want you to pay for the privilege to do so via advertising/post boosting. This is especially true if your business is posting a lot of promotional posts; the reach on these will be even worse than normal.
- There is an overwhelming "crush" of content on Facebook you need to compete against. This makes it harder to stand out in the news feed. More competition means it is harder to be heard.
- Facebook has tried to move back towards a system of prioritising 'friends and family' content. Many users abandoned Facebook because all they saw was commercial content and Facebook page posts. Facebook have indicated a desire to change the algorithm back to a more traditional focus of showing you content from friends and family, meaning worse organic reach for pages.
In the context of those factors, it's not hard to see why Facebook organic reach has been declining ... and why it continues to do so.
But does that mean you need to abandon Facebook as an option for getting your brand and products/services in front of potential customers?
Absolutely not!
In fact, there are a number of things you can do to boost your organic reach - without needing to spend a ton more money.
Here's a video showing a quick overview of organic reach, plus ten easy and effective steps to getting more reach:
In fact, there are a number of things you can do to boost your organic reach - without needing to spend a ton more money.