Facebook Makes It Harder for People to See Your Business Page

Facebook’s December algorithm change has cut the reach of brand pages nearly 50% in their never-ending push to get page owners to “boost” their posts.  Boosting a post is a cute slogan that means paying Facebook to publish your post in the news feed of your fans.

Until recently, Facebook’s algorithm consisted of analyzing how many people interact with a post on your business page by liking, commenting or sharing it.  The quantity of interaction would determine how visible that post would be in the newsfeed of your fans.  This was a fun system.  Page owners had to get creative luring their fans into interaction.  For me, as the manager of my customers’ Facebook pages, this creative challenge was invigorating.

During the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that the posts on our business pages were not getting much interaction.  At first, I took it personally.  My creative juices were not flowing or I was getting lazy or something.  It wasn’t long until I knew something was up with the lovely people at Facebook, my mojo was just fine, which led to this angry tweet. 

After a little research and some helpful advice from Shelly Kramer at V3, I found this from Ignite Social Media:

“Ignite Social Media analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.”  Read more. 

Furthermore, Ignite speculates that brand reach is now often under 3%.  Part of our spiel here at Broadstreet is to remind new customers that whatever they invest in Facebook doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to Facebook.  A business ultimately has no control on whatever content they invest on Facebook.  And this is fine, as long as you understand it.  Facebook has been and continues to be a great tool to reach your customers.  But please, don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket or you’ll be up a creek without a paddle.  Despite the mixed metaphors, you get the picture.

Let me encourage you to take ownership of your data.  You need a website, not just a Facebook page, now more than ever.  There are many platforms on which to build your site.  We use Drupal.  Find the platform that’s best for you, if it happens to be Drupal, give us a call.  If your business relies on just a Facebook page, now is the time to make some serious changes.

Read more:  Ignite. &  V3 Integrated Marketing