I noticed a decline over the past year of my Facebook post’s organic reach. This has been steady and especially prevalent when I start a new page off with Facebook ads.

Traditionally one could bank on at least 15% of your ‘Likes’ seeing your posts organically in their feeds. This is certainly not the case anymore.

Facebook have openly stated that fan page owners can expect a decline in their post’s organic reach over time.

Time to shine your credit card’s black strip folks.

What happened?

The situation is the same for many fan pages and getting worse. You take a lot of time to build your Facebook following, gather likes, encourage engagement, and all of a sudden your post barely reaches 1% organically…

You then try posting at different times of the day or night thinking you must be doing something wrong only to find this isn’t helping jack.

Want to see more really cool articles? Only if you must…

You struggle for a while, you cry, eat ice cream thinking it’s all over and then that little blue ‘Boost” button. Hmmmm…

You are not alone.

Coincidental or a Master Revenue Plan?

I won’t bother answering the above or discussing it in further detail as we both know that this is a deliberate action on behalf of our lovely mates over at FB to get us to click ‘Boost’…

Big as following (half the world using FB) + a major target audience for marketers and advertisers = lots of money in potential ad revenue. Genius!

FB shares anyone?

I’m still getting organic reach! The experiment…

That’s great, good for you. I am not and many aren’t either. I have started many pages over the last six months with a decent sized budget to grow audience and engagement.

I open a page, get some posts going and immediately use ads to grow the page ‘Likes’. Within a few days I have a decent following and in theory I can simply start posting away and get ‘reach’ right? Wrong.

As mentioned earlier in this post, this problem is even more aggressive when you aggressively advertise. It seems the more I spend the less reach I have almost as if the algorithm flags the page as “willing spender”.

Looking at many of my older pages with mostly organically grown fans (no ads) this does not feel as aggressive as some of the newer pages, but definitely not reaching anywhere near the 15% benchmark.

Furthermore, the myths surrounding the first two weeks and FB measuring the engagement for future reference seems bogus.

Where it still works.

Where organic reach still works is where the customer is a loyal customer waiting for you to post something. There are pages out there that believe they have the magic formula but not many.

As true as this may be to some extent for some of you, this is not necessary the way it should work. The old 15% benchmark seems very reasonable to me.

Let’s go Dancing- one less platform to post to?

There’s a reason why FB is so popular and such an important part of your business; your customers love it.

As much as I love Google+, I simply cannot get the same customers onto G+. It almost feels like Google+ is simply full of others like you and I looking for everyone but us.

In reality, we cannot boycott a platform that is so widely used by our customers. Moreover, they certainly don’t seem “to get” what we do as page owners. There is so much going on behind the scenes.

I’ve been fortunate that the businesses I work for have budgets to spend but less fortunate for some of my personal fan pages where I don’t have the budget.

So, I can only see two possible scenarios;

1. Spend baby spend.
2. Don’t spend and go about your business

Simple enough, but does not solve the problem- I know. There are a few posts on this subject online that encourage you to move your fan base to an email list. As we all know it can be hard enough to get the ‘like’ in the first place let alone get the email signup.

If it is possible to capture email subscribers then definitely do it. The same goes for encouraging different social media platforms too.

As for me, I am starting to reconsider the use of FB as a whole. I guess I came into the game a little past the peak of what you could achieve with FB. Ever since it has felt like a complete waste of time and money unless you have the budget to not only increase your fan base but also engage (for more money).

This should serve as a lesson to all business owners. A corporate like FB or Google (Search) can kill a digital business overnight with an update or an ad policy change in their favour.

Any comments or experiences, please do share with us.