“Why is my Facebook organic reach so low? Is organic reach in decline?” — this is the question that keeps owners in their worst nightmare. Brands and publishers appear to be getting further away from the viral success they seek on social media with each new News Feed algorithm update.
Due to its large user base of 2.41 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a favorite among marketers. In addition, it demonstrates how much time users spend using this international social connectivity platform. Businesses can also market different products because different age groups, including baby boomers and Gen Z, are all in one location.
However, the issue of small businesses having little money to spend on advertising continues to be a problem. Nevertheless, they continue to have a market and use Facebook organic reach for advertising their services and goods. Read on this blog from RecurPost, a social media scheduler, to find out what affects your post position in News Feeds, and learn how to schedule Facebook posts to boost Facebook’s organic reach.
What is Facebook Organic Reach?
The number of people who view your content on Facebook when you don’t pay to boost it is known as its “organic reach.” On the other hand, Facebook’s advertising and “boosted” posts entail marketers paying the site to make their advertisements visible. Utilizing Facebook’s organic reach for advertising has become more complex over time. Changes to their algorithm, which favors content you are connected with, are primarily to blame for this decline. But that doesn’t mean that Facebook can’t still be used for this kind of marketing.
How to Increase Organic Reach on Facebook: 10 Impactful Ways
Ah, organic reach on Facebook. No other social media marketing topic has generated as much debate or headaches. Nevertheless, there is still hope for your organic posts, even though the obvious solution is to invest more time and money in paid Facebook advertisements. You can make Facebook an effective distribution channel for your organic content by accepting the algorithm, reaching a large audience, and engaging users. How? By remembering these 10 crucial suggestions.
Choose what to Post in advance
Facebook posts perform well if they are helpful to users. It is, therefore, best to carefully choose the content you publish on your page. But first, you must ensure that your posts are worthwhile and pertinent to your audience. Increasing engagement will raise your post to the top of users’ news feeds.
On Facebook’s insights page, you can locate your best-performing posts. First, your published content’s reach and engagement statistics are displayed under “Posts.” Then, identify the posts that received positive feedback and revive the subjects in a fresh format, such as an article, infographic, case study, or video.
Ask Followers to Prioritize You
Encourage your followers to give your page top priority. They will probably be open to your request if they admire your work. Include detailed instructions on how to complete this favor in your request. They are less likely to comply if you don’t give them instructions and they don’t know how. By selecting “See First” under the “Following” button next to your page’s cover photo, followers can make your content more prominent in their news feeds.
Create Interesting Caption
This is particularly crucial because cross-posting to Twitter or Instagram has grown in popularity. Simply put, Facebook cannot be used as a repository for content intended for other platforms. Make it a point to:
- Create original captions.
- Take care not to post only external links.
- Add a call to action (“comment below”).
These pointers are essential for maximizing Facebook organic reach and algorithmic favoritism.
Post to maintain consistency
Unsurprisingly, many of the most popular Facebook accounts publish new content daily (or near-daily). This is because consistency is important to build your presence and signal your activity to the algorithm.
You can queue up content using tools like RecurPost to make sure you’re consistently publishing new posts. When you want to get the most out of your Facebook marketing efforts, a Facebook post scheduler like RecurPost can greatly assist you. You don’t have to worry about timing, managing engagement, or how your audience will react to them if you schedule Facebook posts in advance.
Quick Tour to RecurPost
RecurPost is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to create posts with the desired caption, links, images, videos, and editable Canva options. One can choose RecurPost as one of the best and most cost-free crowdfire alternatives for themselves. RecurPost has a feature that allows you to shorter URLs; even you can import updates from different tools. The advantages of using RecurPost as a Facebook scheduling tool are as follows:
1. Posting a bulk schedule
You can plan and schedule hundreds of posts in advance for various Facebook pages, profiles, or groups by using RecurPost’s social media bulk scheduling feature. You can accomplish this by making unique content libraries for each account.
2. Incorporate original media and hashtags
The typical Facebook post ideas scheduler is RecurPost. Instead, you can add various media, such as GIFs, videos, and images, using the features that it renders. This tool will provide you with the best experience thanks to its special features, which include a hashtag generator plugin, a GIF plugin, a URL shortener, free stock images, and a feed manager.
Beyond those already mentioned, RecurPost provides additional advantages. You can easily learn how to use the Facebook post scheduler for more organic reach.
Best Time to Post
You might know that posting at the best time increases engagement. If you post your content at any time, it will definitely be going to get lost. Of course, optimizing the timing of your content guarantees engagement, but it also does raise the possibility that people will see your recent posts soon.
Using RecurPost’s best time to post feature can help determine when the user will be online. Posting at a time when your users are most likely to be on Facebook increases the likelihood that your content will appear first in their feed, which results in an increase in organic reach.
However, because more people will post during peak hours, you will face greater competition to see your posts in users’ feeds. The best solution is to publish your content right before the busiest times so that it is the first thing people see when they open Facebook. For instance, according to RecurPost, if the best time to post is at 4 o’clock, try posting at 3:45 to catch the wave early.
Pro tip: Request your audience turns on their post notifications if you want them to see your content every time you publish it. It’s an excellent way to raise your visibility naturally!
No more Praying
Your content is lost and rendered invisible by the vast amount of content in everyone’s newsfeed. Consider choosing an audience that will affect your leads and sales. You will not in any way benefit from increasing your publishing frequency if you want to broaden your organic audience. If your content isn’t of high enough quality, appealing to your audience, and relevant to your brand, it won’t accomplish anything.
Advice: Prioritize content quality over quantity and use the right publishing frequency.
Use Facebook Live
Because of their ability to generate excitement and discussion among viewers, Facebook Live Live videos are a success for every brand. Over native videos, Facebook Live videos have a higher organic reach according to 80% of brands.
A topic that works incredibly well for Live videos is AMA (Ask Me Anything). It will first aid a brand in learning more about the desires of their audience and fostering a sincere connection with them. Later, a brand can focus on the needs of its potential customers and developers to deliver the most value.
Apart from live, you can also consider to schedule Facebook group posts and improve your presence in multiple FB groups.
Develop yourself into a Useful Resource for Your Industry
Each of us has a Facebook page we frequently visit to find relevant information about our industry. They are pages with something interesting to share and keep us informed of events. Make it your mission to serve as a useful resource in your field. How would you approach doing that? Here are three concrete actions you can take right now to get started in that direction:
- Consider the issues that your users and fans are experiencing.
- Share content created by others.
- Share your expertise.
Avoid Click-baits
Despite how alluring it may be, you should never use clickbait! Clickbait will almost certainly not increase your Facebook organic reach; on the contrary, it will cause your posts to be downgraded.
Facebook gives posts’ quality a lot of consideration. As a result, publishing low-quality content or dubious links will probably catch the platform’s attention—and not in a good way.
Because of this, whenever you create and publish content, avoid dubious techniques like using clickbait – the risk is simply not worth it.
Use Trendy Topics
You can develop a solid content strategy by paying attention to the platform’s most popular topics. Using Facebook Business’ Hot Topic Tool, you can even check out the newest trends by category, industry, date, age, gender, and more. You can increase organic traffic Facebook and promote your brand by carefully planning and timing your events.
What is Facebook Organic Reach v/s Paid Reach?
As long as you don’t pay to boost them (more on “boosting” later), all organic posts are work-in-progress images, random thoughts, exchanging posts with other accounts, and links to blog posts. As a result, organic content typically reaches far fewer eyes than a paid post unless it goes viral.
But you can’t completely ignore them. Brands can still interact daily with followers using organic posts. For instance, brands can highlight user-generated content (UGC), share photos of their products, or ask current trending questions.
Return to paid reach, however, if you want to reach your target audience more quickly and effectively. Sales, announcements, and other important information must be accessible for a fee.
Knowing when to use one to optimize your site is, therefore, more important than choosing one over the other. The ultimate objective is conversion through audience connection. Consequently, you must immediately change your digital marketing strategies if both paid and organic reach fail to result in conversions.
Digital marketing strategies take off by effectively utilizing digital technology for your business in this global economy. Optimize both paid and organic reach instead of sticking with just one strategy to increase your online presence.
How does Facebook Calculate Organic Daily Reach?
The number of times your post is shown on a particular screen is referred to as reach. You can view this data for your page or any specific post on Facebook Insights or another social media automation analytics tool.
Divide the average number of users reached per post (found in Facebook Insights) by the total number of page likes to determine your average page reach. Facebook measures reach in 28-day, weekly, and daily increments, which can occasionally be confusing.
Your daily reach will be increased, for instance, if someone sees your post today. It will count again as daily reach if they see the post again the following day. However, because each reach counts unique views, it will only count once in your reach over a week and a month.
Why should you monitor Facebook Organic reach statistics?
Although both reach and impressions provide insightful data, most businesses give each reach priority. Facebook reach is crucial because:
- It counts users rather than page views. The reach can help you track your progress if you want to ensure that you’re steadily growing your customer base, engaging more of your audience, and raising awareness.
- Reveals whether your audience is being engaged. The Facebook algorithm gives high-quality content from pages with active users’ priority. High reach may be a sign of excellent engagement and quality.
- Enables you to assess the potential of your page. You can better predict the outcomes once you know how many people view your content. How many people are responding to or clicking on your posts? Can you make improvements from one week or month to the next?
How does Facebook Advertising Increase your Organic Reach?
Organic reach is challenging for businesses to achieve because of the high demand for News Feed real estate and the new algorithm. Even if you invest in Facebook ads, reaching your audience is still difficult; however, Facebook’s various tools and features for advertisers make it simpler.
For instance, Facebook provides various ad targeting options to help you find the right customers. Users can be selected for targeting based on their location, age, demographics, devices, interests, and behavior. Using these targeting options, you can serve your ads to users who are most likely interested in your company. In addition, you can select from various ad objectives when using Facebook advertising. For instance, you could select the app installs objective if you wanted to run a campaign promoting your app to increase downloads. With this goal in mind, users who are most likely to download your app will see your advertisement.
Facebook advertising also provides a variety of ad formats and bidding options, enabling you to be imaginative with your content at a price you can afford. For example, you can choose between video, single image, carousel, and Instant Experience ad formats.
It would be best if you continued to focus on organic reach even though Facebook advertising undoubtedly aids in achieving your business objectives. Posting organic content still has value, and you can use the platform to gain more exposure. However, it would be best if you simply worked a little more complicatedly.
How to Check your Facebook Page Organic Reach?
As was already mentioned, the Facebook organic reach can be evaluated page-wide and posted. We advise keeping an eye out for trends and long-term reach (either upward or downward). There will always be outliers in your content, so focusing excessively on a single day or week won’t have a lasting impact.
The good news is that many options are available for where and how you can monitor your reach. Facebook Insights, for instance, offers a valuable breakdown of post reach and page interactions. Yet again, it’s crucial to keep an eye on trends and takeaways rather than becoming fixated on particular figures. For instance, consider the following inquiries:
- Is my Facebook following gaining or losing ground? Why?
- How does my organic and paid reach compare?
- Which particular content pieces achieve the greatest reach?
For marketers, finding the similarities between their best-performing posts is essential. In addition, you can easily track your impressions and reach over time with a platform like RecurPost to see how you’re trending and whether adjustments to your content strategy impact you.
With RecurPost’s white label repost, you can also check the performance details of your posts to see whether they are receiving more or fewer fans or page clicks.
How does the News Feed Algorithm Work in Increasing Facebook Reach?
The quality score of your post determines whether or not it is displayed at the top of users’ feeds. Each post is ranked in the News Feed by Facebook’s algorithm based on who posted it, what kind of post it was, and how many people engaged with it.
Keeping this in mind, by now, you must get to know how the Facebook algorithm works to determine which post works great for users to increase organic traffic on Facebook. It is not easy to crack any Facebook algorithm, but some ranking factors can do best for your post.
Inventory
Consequently, inventory is the first factor. The term “inventory” refers to the total amount of content that Facebook’s News Feed can show a user, which changes as a result of user activity once scrolling has started. Everything friends and publishers post falls under this category.
Signals
Signals are vital components of the Facebook algorithm that notifies Facebook about the post. These signals can be divided into two groups:
- The non-active metrics like view time, time posted, and story type is known as passive signals.
- Likes, shares, comments, and other active events that encourage engagement are known as Active Signals. To promote positive engagement, or what Facebook refers to as “meaningful interactions,” you should create attractive content.
Predictions
Have you ever used Facebook to search for something specific, only to have your news feed overrun with results from the exact search? According to Facebook, that is Prediction. Predictions depict a user’s behavior and the likelihood of engaging positively with a piece of content.
Relevancy Score
Facebook gives each content or posts a score indicating its relevance to the user. So, for instance, a higher score suggestion to the post will probably appear in your news feed. Ensure your content falls in this factor to gain more organic reach on Facebook.
Why is Facebook Organic Reach Declining?
In 2015, organic reach for branded Facebook pages significantly declined and hit an all-time low of 2%. So you may be wondering what on earth Facebook is doing.
Here are the two causes of declining organic reach in Facebook, according to a study:
- More Content – With over 2.8 billion active users publishing content daily, there is currently more content being posted than there is news feed space.
- Facebook prioritizes news feeds that are specifically tailored to each user’s interests for each user to boost engagement and improve user experience.
Many marketers think Facebook wants to encourage brands to spend more money on paid advertising, so the organic reach in Facebook is declining.
To combat the News Feed changes, you should first publish visually appealing and engaging content. This kind of content will assist you in engaging your audience in meaningful dialogue and motivating them to participate, particularly in the comments section. But you can try a tonne of other things! You will be more helpful if you take all the steps mentioned earlier. With this, we came to the end of knowing how to grow a Facebook page organically.
Which platforms does RecurPost support in addition to Facebook?
Conclusion
With 2.93 billion users as of right now, Facebook must be a part of your company’s marketing strategy. However, any algorithm may find it challenging to select a piece of content to highlight for a brief period of time. Thus, on Facebook organic reach is challenging. Instead, concentrate your efforts on producing informative content for your audience that satisfies their needs and wants. And if you put the advice in this article to use, your Facebook organic reach will undoubtedly increase.
So it’s your turn now. What’s your Facebook page’s average organic reach? And what strategies are you using to improve Facebook organic reach? Let discuss them in the comment section below.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people saw your post as a result of unpaid promotion? Like search engine rankings work, Facebook’s Organic Reach bases what you see on factors like popularity, post frequency, likelihood that you’ll like a post, and more.
Facebook ads have increased directly due to the decline in organic reach. Ads do represent a direct way to grab your audience’s attention, even though your potential reach largely depends on your bidding strategy and targeting. And for many brands, the expense is wholly justified.
On Facebook, organic reach isn’t gone; it’s just changed. It would be best if you acknowledged that, while it might not instantly make your brand a household name, it can certainly be an important partner. You can still achieve a respectable level of engagement and reach if you are wise about it and take advantage of the adjustments to what is prioritized.
A Facebook post’s average organic reach is 5.2% of the total number of page likes. The word “average” is the key here, as brands with consistently less engaging content and less platform activity will experience lower reach rates. However, it is reasonable to have a reliable number as a benchmark and to know what to anticipate.
No. The best action to take is if your current Facebook post doesn’t already have a respectable amount of engagement. After all, boosting it will only magnify the effect you’re already experiencing, and a decline in organic reach is sure to follow.
Running a contest encouraging people to comment on your post can significantly increase your organic reach. A caption competition, for example, in which users must provide a funny subtitle to an image you’ve posted, can generate a flood of responses and propel your post to the top of the News Feed.
Debbie Moran is a Digital marketing strategist with 5+ years of experience producing advertising for brands and helping leaders showcase their brand to the correct audience. She has been a part of RecurPost since 2019 and handles all the activities required to grow our brand’s online presence.