Facebook Organic Reach Decline | Next Steps

facebook organic reach declineDoes the Facebook organic reach decline have your business' marketing plan turned upside down?

Facebook Organic Reach – The What and Why

According to Facebook's VP of Ads Product Marketing Brian Boland, the organic reach enjoyed by countless small business owners on Facebook is going away, potentially down to zero.  Put in plain terms, your fans and audience on Facebook will not see your posts anymore unless you pay to “boost” them.  Wait – WHAT?!  Yes, this organic reach decline is coming as a shock to many business owners, especially those who have invested tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a massive following on Facebook.  Many Facebook business page owners are rightfully angry that they now have to pay just to get in front of their own fans.

 

The main impact of the Facebook organic reach decline:

According to the latest reports from Facebook,

your “Facebook organic reach” on fan pages is now only 5%.

 

facebook organic reach declineFacebook Organic Reach – What's The New Push Look Like

According to the latest reports from Facebook, your “organic reach” on fan pages is now only 5%.  Yes, this means that every time you post approximately just 5% of your total fans will be shown your post in their news feed.  Pretty awful, huh?  It seems like just yesterday that Facebook had no ads on it and there was no sign that it was every going to try and suck money out us.  Well times have changed, Facebook is now a publicly traded company, and it appears they are doing absolutely everything they can to track our every move and use that data as justification to business owns as to why they should pay money just to get their posts in front of their own fans.  So where do we go from here and overcome the now virtually non existent Facebook organic reach?  Read on to the next section:

With Facebook's organic reach basically gone, how do I thrive in this new model?

You can still get the absolute cheapest, targeted traffic from Facebook to your posts and/or business's website using Facebook.  You just need to pay for it now so it is crucial that you understand some general best practices for getting the cheapest clicks.  First, understand that the more you use all of the Facebook ad platform's features, the cheaper the clicks get because the more likely the audience is to like your post or ad, the better it is for everyone.  Specifically, Facebook gives you the ability to create a “tracking pixel” which is basically just a snippet of code that you can copy/paste into the “head tag” of your web site and that enables Facebook to begin building a list of your website's visitors to market to on Facebook.  Since that new “custom audience” are all past website visitors, they are most likely to click on your ad and therefore Facebook will charge you the least to get in front of your own website visitors.

Next, you can save money by testing up to 6 images with each ad and monitor which image converts the best.  You may be surprised to discover that the image you think will work best almost never does.  The images that usually work best are those that include people and specifically one with a person's face looking at you.

Finally, its smart to launch your first ads using only small amounts of money so you can test to see what gets cheap clicks, and then increase the budget for ads that are converting the best and for the cheapest amount of money.  Targeting-wise, its cheapest to have the widest audience, yet one that is still pretty targeted.  For example, one service we sell is sales coaching so we might run a Facebook ad to all Facebook users who list “LinkedIn” as one of their main interests.  You can combine multiple “interests” when targeting your audience in general Facebook ad campaigns but your conversion will nearly always be the best when you target your custom audience in the form of the past website visitors (using the tracking mechanism mentioned above).

In conclusion, yes it stinks that Facebook has become a major sell-out and is restricting the organic reach of your business page big time however there are definately cheap ways to leverage Facebook in the form of boosted posts and cheap ads.