The Decline of Organic Facebook Reach & How to Adjust to the Algorithm | Social media management company Services | Social media marketing | Facebook

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The Decline of Organic Facebook Reach & How to Adjust to the Algorithm.

Dear Client as you may or may not have noticed organic reach and engagement on Facebook posts are at an all-time low. New Perspective Design, as managers of over 20 Facebook business pages compiled data during 2020. We aimed to determine the cause and create an appropriate strategy for our client’s respective social media marketing pages. 

Please read through this to understand the changes that are taking place and how New Perspective Design proposes an effective response to keep your business page ticking over with engagement and reach. 

Background: Social media marketing in 2020. 

It’s no secret that organic reach has been declining incrementally since 2014. Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology (at the time), said:  

Facebook is simply managing more ad content than it used to, and News Feed space is thus more competitive among marketers.

Boland, now Facebook’s VP of Publisher Solutions, is right. There’s simply too much content being published on Facebook, making visibility in the News Feed increasingly competitive. Facebook strives to show people the content that is most relevant to them, as opposed to surfacing all the content available”.

Adam Mosseri also said:

Facebook began to shift ranking to make News Feed more about connecting with people and less about consuming media in isolation.”

As a result, marketing content was poised to take a backseat to content by friends and family — a value that Facebook says it originally had, and that it’s trying to return to.

We have seen over the years a decline in organic reach on various formats of social media content. Irrespective if they have a few hundred followers or a few thousand followers our bar was always set at a 5% engagement rate but with reach declining this became a useless metric. 

In a recent statement and THIS is the one that really hits home Facebook said: 

“Even if those Fans have seemingly elected to see a brand’s posts by liking their Page in the first place from Facebook’s perspective, it’s simply not an ideal user experience to flood the News Feed with posts just because a Page has lots of Likes and is publishing prolifically.”

What’s more: 

“Nowadays, Facebook is encouraging marketers to look at their fan bases as a way to make paid advertising more effective rather than using it as a free broadcast channel. Additionally, Facebook says you should assume organic reach will eventually arrive at zero. So, if you really want to reach your target audience on Facebook, you’ll need to supplement your organic efforts with some paid advertising.”

The takeaway is that even a user that has liked and followed your page is getting less likely to see your posts. The reach of a page to its followers is currently averaged at 2%. As alluded to above as well as confirmed by our experience will eventually become close to zero. 

Now, this is a curious move. It allows users to enjoy the Facebook social aspect without getting bombarded with marketing (this is to curb this decline in overall users ). However, businesses still want to reach consumers on Facebook and will now make most posts paid since the reach will be poor organically. 

Facebook gets to keep its users and make more ad revenue. They get the best of both worlds as a social media platform and a marketing platform. 

 

Our solution. 

Traditionally when creating a Facebook page one would use paid advertising at the start to acquire many likes and followers, at a later stage paid advertising becomes less important as your organic followers are engaging sharing, and seeing your content. 

 

However, with less than 2% of followers now seeing posts from pages they follow, likes have become nothing more than social proof.

The cold hard truth is that the majority of posts should be targeted with Facebook ads even if it’s for your page followers. 

At New Perspective Design, we provide 4 posts a month on most packages and usually advertise 1, 2, or 3 of them depending on the respective contract. 

An example of the averages we pulled during this year:

facebook-social-media-marketing-results

4 posts even when we give them a very gracious rate of 10% engagement cannot produce what 2 paid posts do in terms of reach and engagement.

We are adjusting our social media marketing strategy in two ways accordingly.

Solution 1: Keep marketing costs the same

Instead of 4 posts, we will create two posts monthly however both will be paid posts.  

Some clients will have 3 or 4 paid posts dependant on their package. Our end goal is to eliminate organic posting as they produce a low return on investment. 

Your contract amount will remain the same. In return for creating less content, your content will all be posted as paid content with higher overall reach and engagement in a month.

Solution 2: Increase your reach.

If your business still wants to maintain 4 posts a month we would still advise to have them as paid posts. This of course will incur extra costs of an average of R150 per post – Excluding those already set as paid posts in the contract.

Closure

Of course, you are welcome to keep things the way they are if you are happy with your Social media marketing results it’s our job however to advise on best practices and ensure our clients understand the motivation behind our strategy adjustments.

This post has been created especially for those who have contracts with us, should you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us – All social media accounts will be moved to a full paid strategy meaning all of you posts will be paid posts and that there will be less frequent posting. Should you however not want this please let us know by the 25th Nov.

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Written By: New Perspective Design

New Perspective Design is a leading graphic and web design agency based in East London South Africa. We also specialize in the fields of search engine optimization and online marketing with over 6 years of experience in the industry. Our agency has a passion for growing business online and thrives on mutually beneficial relationships with our clients.

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