FB Organic Reach Decline - the Final Nail in the Coffin

Organic Reach of Facebook posts published by Facebook pages has been steadily declining for a couple of years now. This is a well-known thing since the sweeping change. The addition of a separate Explore Feed and segregation of all organically delivered Page Posts into this new feed – seemed by many as the final nail in the coffin.

Boosterberg Facebook Explore Feed

So, is organic reach on Facebook dead?

To answer the question, let’s take a look at what the Facebook Organic Reach is? Organic Reach on Facebook is simply a measurement of how many people can find you on Facebook for free.
Well, now why we can say it is really dead? Well, the organic reach has plummeted in recent years. So much so, that in 2021, the average organic reach on Facebook is down to about 2.2% . Imagine this – you have around 1000 people who follow your business profile, from these only about 22 of them will see your post. On LinkedIn, your organic reach is around 5.3%, and on Instagram, it’s a little better – about 9.4%. (source)

Facebook point of view

This is, of course, understandable from both sides. One side is that there is more content than ever before and the news feed space for it to be shown is the same. The other is Facebook’s point of view. They are a business, and they want to maximize the profit that their advertising model can bring. Organic reach, which for Facebook Pages is essentially free advertising, was driven down over the years… From 100+ percent of Page Fans, all the way down to and it seems to have culminated in this change.

What does it mean for Facebook Page Owners

– When viewing their normal Facebook Feed, users no longer see any of your Page posts, it does not matter if they are your page fans or not.

– If users switch to the Explore Feed, they may see your Page posts there, similarly to how they saw them before in the main feed. In addition to seeing the posts of Facebook pages that the users liked, they will also see posts from other similar Pages that Facebook algorithm thinks they might like.

– If you want to show your Page posts inside the regular Facebook Feed, you will have to use paid promotion and boost your posts. These boosted posts (ads) can be seen in the regular feed, same as before.

Facebook Post Performance since the change of the feed

Nobody can predict what exactly will happen to the actual post-performance. An educated guess would be that the organic reach of your Page Posts will go down to the level of irrelevance, and a big drop in numbers (up to 90%) is already visible on big publishing house Facebook Pages.

It is possible that Facebook will put more effort into motivating users to browse the Explore Feed which would help bolster Organic Reach of Page Posts, but for the foreseeable future, promoting posts seems the only feasible way to guarantee that your posts will get to the users you want.

How does it impact my Boosterberg campaigns?

If you are boosting all your posts regularly, whether using Boosterberg or not, nothing really changes for you – your posts will be visible in the normal default Facebook Feed, same way as before. If you used to analyze the organic performance of your posts though, you need to prepare for a change: your performance success thresholds will change for sure. It may be, that you will find this approach of analyzing organic data is no longer viable at all, if the organic reach drops below statistically usable numbers.

If this is the case, you can use Boosterberg to create this simple extension of your campaigns that will provide you with reliable data:

1. Set up a separate “Prospecting” ad set with the exact same ad set settings as your usual ad set, but with a very low budget and daily budget spend, that will generate a level playing field.

2. Set this ad set to boost every new post, with a stop condition that will deactivate after a short time (depending on your content – if it’s news, it can be just a couple of hours, if it’s content that will be relevant even in a couple of days, it can be 24 hours), option to boost multiple posts at a time set to ON.

3. If you are using reach as a performance indicator, don’t forget to change the “Reach” boosting condition from “Organic” to “Total“, so that Boosterberg takes also paid reach (gained from our prospecting ad set) into account.

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