With Facebook’s organic reach trending on a decline, is Facebook still an effective way to market your company without paying for Facebook ads and boosting posts? According to Facebook, “organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution. Paid reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post as a result of ads.”
Facebook announced back in 2012 that it would restrict its organic reach to about 16%. However, it didn’t stop there – roughly two years later in February 2014, social@Ogilvy found that organic reach actually declined even further to around 6%. It is becoming quite clear that the trajectory is downwards and won’t be changing, so we can expect organic reach to be zero in the near future. This leaves many businesses, big and small wondering if Facebook is still an effective way to reach their audience. It is, if you pay for your ads, but not really if you plan on reaching your audience organically since only such a small portion of your followers will see your content.
It seems that it would be natural for the reach to be restricted and decline as Facebook’s popularity and user-base grew: more people means more posts and more posts, which can be overwhelming for users, so not every post or story makes it into peoples’ news feed. However, with the decline being so drastic, with organic reach going as far down as 2% for larger Facebook pages (500 000+ likes), Facebook is starting to look very unattractive for businesses and marketers as a way of free advertising. With the ball in their court, it appears that Facebook is cornering businesses into paid advertisements: pay and your followers will see your posted content, do not pay (going the organic route) and the content will go unnoticed. Gone are the days of free ads, we are now entering an era of Facebook that will require companies to pay for their ads and boost important posts. We are seeing (part) owned media being turned into paid media in front of our eyes.
The decline of Facebook’s organic reach. Source: https://social.ogilvy.com/facebook-zero-considering-life-after-the-demise-of-organic-reach/