Recently, many Facebook page admins have experienced a significant decrease in Total Reach—specifically, organic reach. For pages that want to keep their ad budget as low as possible, maximizing organic reach is vital.
To best understand how to make a change like this work for you, and not against you, we need to examine what happened—and what you can do about it.
We analyze and monitor this type of data for thousands of pages with a tool called EdgeRank Checker. By monitoring metrics such as reach and engagement over time, we can get a better understanding of how to advise companies to continue to optimize their strategy. We've collected this data over the past few months against roughly 1,000 anonymous Facebook pages.
What happened?
Facebook page admins most often run into two metrics: reach and engagement. Facebook presents this data when viewing your posts by showing the number of likes, comments, and shares, along with how many people saw the post.
What does "1,000 people saw this post" actually mean, though?
Facebook adds up everyone who saw the post, whether you paid for people to see it, people shared it with their friends, or Facebook gave you free distribution in the news feed. The people who saw it for free combine with the people who shared it to create "organic reach." When people see your post because you paid for additional exposure, they call it "paid reach."
- Organic Reach = Free distribution + People who share
- Paid Reach = People who saw it because you paid
- Total Reach = Organic reach + Paid reach
On December 2, 2013, Facebook announced that they would be placing an emphasis on links while continuing to punish meme content in the news feed.
Around this time, we noticed a significant drop in organic reach for many pages. Page admins around the world were reporting a drastic drop in their organic reach. Not all pages were severely impacted by the change, but the majority seemed to be impacted negatively.
We've seen changes like this in the past. In fact, every time we've ever studied organic reach (we've been monitoring it closely for ~three years) we've found it has decreased over time. The reason being that the past three years have seen steady growth from Facebook, which means increased competition to get into the news feed. During this time, Facebook has continued to improve its news feed algorithm to focus on quality content—raising the bar for any page on the platform.
Examining the numbers
In the graph below, the first bar represents September 2012 (for a reference point), while the rest of the bars represent months within 2013. Over a year ago, organic reach fared much better than it does today. In the past few months, we've seen a decrease from 12.6% to 7.7%.
We specifically examined the 28 days before and after December 2nd:
When changes like this have occurred in the past, Facebook has tended to defend its news feed changes by attempting to keep engagement rates roughly equal. How did engagement data fare?
In general, engagement levels for pages fluctuated within normal variations. In some cases, engagement actually increased. From Facebook's perspective, this is a good change for their news feed; it provides a better experience for the typical Facebook user, as they are seeing less of the stuff they don't want to engage with.
How did different content types fare?
All of the content types experienced decreases over the time period analyzed. Status updates continue to outperform videos, photos, and links for organic reach. Status updates have held strongly over the past year as the top-performing content type for organic reach.
A look at individual pages
Not all pages were impacted the same. We saw some pages experience drastic decreases, while others were positively impacted by the change. We examined a few of these pages to dig deeper into theories on why they may have been impacted so extremely.
Some pages experienced significant, and abrupt, decreases in reach:
The page above experienced a significant decrease closer towards December 5th. After the change, not a single post experienced more than 15% organic reach (compared to their previous average around 25%). This page posted mostly status updates and often asked for engagement. Take a look at their status updates when asking for engagement:
In the graph above, you can see a clear and abrupt change around December 6th.
However, other pages experienced significant improvement:
The page above experienced an increase after the change (we found a few of these). This page exclusively posted photos over this time period and did not regularly ask for engagement. Let's take a look at their photo posts:
Around December 8th, this page experienced an increased average in organic reach. It benefited from the change. After that point, this page did not have as many low-reaching posts, and had many more high-reaching posts (note: our system maxed them out at 100% impressions / fan).
What did these pages do differently?
| Page A | Page B |
| Posted mostly status updates | Posted mostly photos |
| Asked for engagement frequently | Rarely asked for engagement |
| Saw a significant decrease in organic reach | Saw a significant increase in organic reach |
Interestingly, Facebook did specifically reiterate that they would be focusing on "high quality content" that isn't often using drastic calls to action to attract engagement. This may be the reason behind the difference in organic reach.
In an informal poll of Facebook admins, a vast majority of respondents self-reported drastic decreases. Sprinkled throughout the responses were some admins who were able to reduce the impact of the change (or even improve it). In our data, we found ~80% pages experienced a decrease over the time period.
7 tips to gain reach instead of losing it
The pages that were least impacted by the changes tended to focus on avoiding meme content, as well as avoiding frequent use of calls to action. Facebook is attempting to decrease these types of tactics in the news feed. Pages that have heavily used these tactics in the past may be more severely punished.
Facebook has said (and always maintained) that it is ideal to structure your content in the most logical way. Stories that include links should be posted as links. Many page admins like to include links within the descriptions of photos, however this is against Facebook's general wishes. We always suggest to deliver your content in the best way for your audience to actually consume it.
- Focus, focus, focus on engagement.
- Study, analyze, and understand why your fans click the like button for your content.
- Avoid overusing strong calls to action.
- Avoid using memes.
- Analyze outbound links to determine which source is the most well received.
- Increase post frequency.
- Test different times of day for different types of content (e.g. news stories in the morning and product promotions in the evenings).
How was this data studied?
We examined ~100,000 posts over 11/4 -12/30 from approximately 1,000 pages. For any general metrics we averaged each page's metrics and looked at the median of all the pages when examining aggregate data. Any "per-fan" data examined the metric divided by the number of fans for that page on the the day of posting.
This has a lot of great information, but one area I think many social media managers neglect is diving into the Negative Feedback provided in Insights. Sometimes it's how much people didn't like what your page posts that can help you make better informed decisions about your content strategy on Facebook.
So what if you garnered 1,000 likes on post, but had 1,700 people "hide all" from your page because they didn't like it? A "hide all" is, for all intents and purposes, the same as unliking a page. Looking at how many people unlike a page after certain types of content posts can also be helpful. Over time, you may see a pattern that demonstrates that more people unlike your page when certain themes are used in your content, for example.
Negative Feedback in Insights can help you better identify which types of posts your audience perceived to be spam. These piece are especially important to watch if you've recently seen a lot of audience growth as a result of a promotion, or publicity. That mixture of audience and their behavior changes, so your approach to content may have to change along with it.
The bottom line - while you're studying why your fans are clicking like and share, don't forget to look at how you're turning off people, as well.
Excellent point! This is something we do monitor, but I did not mention in our study. What's interesting about Negative Feedback is that it correlates well with Engagement. Whenever you see a crazy successful post with Engagement, we will see it being one of the higher recipients of Negative Feedback. We believe this is due to additional "unexpected exposure". The people who tend to always engage and see your content, tend to expect it in their news feed—thus have a lower likelihood of reporting Negative Feedback.
As an object picks up speed in the system and begins to show more virally and to non-fans, people begin to see the object who would be in our "unexpected exposure" category. We believe this subset of people have a higher probability of reporting Negative Feedback.
If this is the case, then it's hard to maintain what to avoid... Unless you begin to cluster topics together and monitor the ratio of Negative Feedback : Organic Reach.
I agree that Negative Feedback does correlate well with Engagement as a whole. But the challenges I hear from businesses, especially those in the small-to-medium realm vs. those at the Enterprise level, is that they can't figure out why no one is seeing their posts, let alone have the problem of "unexpected exposure." And, if they are seeing reach, they often wonder why they're not seeing the engagement they'd hoped for.
My comment was more toward the bigger picture, outside of one object picking up. I've been at four different SMX conferences, two Pubcons, and a handful of other conferences in the last year and if I had a nickel for every time someone said, "You have to post quality content," I wouldn't need my day job. But many organizations struggle to define what their audience perceives as quality, and benchmarking the negative feedback as it aligns with a content strategy is one way to help make that more clear.
I personally think many still overvalue the post "like" - it's like walking through the grocery store and glancing at a magazine cover, something we all do without much thought. But like your Page B example, playing to the user experience is crucial to maintain high organic performance AND capture data about your qualified fan base that is meaningful for your brand.
Annalise and Chad, I hope you can speak more about the negative feedback. Other than just noticing that I don't get as many Likes or comments or shares on one post or another, what else can I "see"? For instance, is there a way I can see who has clicked a "Hide all" on my page- how would I know?
Another question about not including a "call to action"...what is considered to be a call to action? An actual worded statement, such as "come check this out", or is just including a link with a photo considered to be a call to action?
This is a helpful article, Chad- thank you.
For each post, Facebook provides "Negative Feedback". This includes how many people hid your post or even reported it as spam. It is tucked away in Facebook Insights I believe under All Posts. Be warned, you'll tend to see high negative feedback on posts that also received a lot of engagement. In our tool, we attempt to normalize this by measuring it against how many people saw your post as well.
You cannot see who actually hid your post, but you will see a count of the number of people who did.
I think the key with Call To Actions (CTAs) is to stay away from from being blatant. Meaning avoid saying "Click LIKE if you agree". Be more clever and natural with it.
Hey Chad,
Great post - We're seeing these drops across all our client's brand pages as well...but I liked your explanation of these changes - clear and concise, thank you!
Question for you on your tips for gaining reach. You mention increasing post frequency. What is your basis for this recommendation? Myself and several clients have reported, anecdotally, decreases in post reach with increased posting frequency. My assumption was that Facebook was punishing brands for posting repeatedly. I'm in the midst of investigating this directly (with all external possible factors, it's been a bit of an exercise to prove this definitively so far). Just wondering your insights on this.
Thanks,
Lindsay
I'm sorry I missed this!
It's a chicken or the egg issue. Increasing post frequency, should increase overall Organic Reach — but may slightly decrease per post Organic Reach. The key here is publishing as frequently as you have high quality content. Not many businesses have the ability to turn up the frequency, because they are already struggling with content creation.
So for me, it's about testing. Try posting one more time a day for 3 days, reexamine your results.
Chad, great post -- now I'll have to check out EdgeRank Checker since it may be very useful for looking into the Facebook pages of our clients. :)
In regards to status posts by pages, I'm sure you probably already saw this, but there was a piece of news from Facebook yesterday (likely after you had already submitted this post to Moz):
As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types. This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.
So, I'm guessing that status posts won't have the greatest organic reach anymore soon?
Also, I'd be curious to hear your further thoughts on this specific point:
Avoid overusing strong calls to action.
I wonder what Facebook considers a "call to action"? If the text accompanying a photo (or video or anything) contains the words "like," "share," or "comment," then that is more obvious. But what if a post merely states something in a questioning or exclamatory way? Such as: "Look at this picture!" or "What do you think about this situation?" That's a subtle "push" to get engagement -- so, would Facebook count that?
Again, great post! Now, off to look at EdgeRank Checker.
I thought someone would comment on that! I'm glad you did.
Yes, Facebook did make an announcement yesterday that we are anticipating more drop in Organic Reach, specifically for Status Updates. A study is needed to fully address the situation at hand, but I believe we'll see Status Update Organic Reach decrease down to the levels of Photos, Links, and Videos.
Photos, Links, and Videos tended to fluctuate most closer to each other in terms of Organic Reach, while Status Updates were clear outliers. I think we'll see these content types cluster together more closely now.
Re: Calls To Action
It's tough to say exactly, but the way we define it in our system is with those examples you used (looking for the words: Like, Comment, Share, Question Marks, etc). This doesn't mean that Facebook is doing the same thing, they have the added advantage of looking at spam reports on a much more granular level (which includes asking if they are trying to game engagement).
The key takeaway of my point is to not overly rely on it. Every post shouldn't include "POST YOUR FAVORITE COLOR IN THE COMMENTS BELOW", we need to move on past that level of "engagement optimization".
Thank you for the insightful reply and answer!
I have friends whose personal blogging projects took a huge hit with this algorithm change. One friend, a food blogger, has several hundred loyal fans and followers on Facebook and by her estimates only 20% of those fans are seeing her new posts. I can understand your content not showing up in every NewsFeed, but when someone has chosen to follow your brand they should be seeing your updates!
I agree with you on this Nick - every Facebook user has the choice to opt-in to receive updates from brands. That's why they followed them in the first place. By making it harder for brands to reach their fans, I think Facebook is working backwards here.
True, but I also understand Facebook's point. Why should they give free advertising to for-profit companies rather than make them pay? (I'd perhaps make exceptions for bona-fide non-profit organizations.)
Thanks for this in-depth analysis. Love your seven tips for gaining reach, as well. Might I add two more from a recent study we conducted at SocialKaty -- and I'd be interested to hear your take on them. Essentially, our study found that posting multiple images in a single post (not in an album) increased Organic Reach by a significant amount.
Two examples:
Here's why: "In other words, Post Clicks - which our data suggests are greatly increased in Photo Posts containing multiple images - had a significant and more valuable effect on Organic Reach than the number of Stories Created." This speaks to your first tip -- focus on engagement! We've found that multiple image posts foster more engagement (mostly in the form of Post Clicks) which it appears Facebook rewards with better Organic Reach.
Our second tip for combating the decrease in Organic Reach is to fully understand and take advantage of "Story Bumping" and "Last Actor" -- particularly Last Actor.
Here is a link to our study on the SocialKaty blog if you'd like to read more:
https://blog.socialkaty.com/post/70432767833/facebook-organic-reach
Thanks again for this great analysis and I'm interested to hear if you have any thoughts on our study!
I have read your study. I think that you may be onto something, but it's much more difficult to study. There are many factors going on. I always encourage research, so keep up the good work!
Regardless of the difficulty studying it, Post Clicks are becoming increasingly important for Facebook analytics. They are the easiest form of engagement and quite frankly I'm surprised it took Facebook this long to focus in on that.
If you are posting a link to a blog with a picture included on Facebook, it still counts it as a link. Does this matter and/or count as a "photo"? Or does the photo have to be independently uploaded to Facebook and then the link attached into the "describe this image" section to be counted as a photo?
Great case study. My page's organic reach went down hugely. Then I started sharing the links without the preview function of links. They get upto 300% organic reach as compared to the links with preview. This is what I found out about the Facebook's algo change.
People often think that because Facebook is a few years old now EdgeRank will settle down. But that's never going to be the case, partly because Facebook will always be learning more about how we interact with the site and partly because they will always be changing the way we interact with it (sponsored posts and the introduction of cover images are good examples of this). A good example of people doing this is Google - they're in their mid-teens now and just think about the algo changes that have happened over the last couple of years.
This is a nice case study; it's good to see some positive advice in the midst of the usual gumpiness about changes. And thanks for the new tool - definitely one to investigate.
This is a great case study Chad. I guess it would also be interesting to see which sectors have been impacted positively or negatively (if we can).
Most of the Facebook page (or other social accounts) admins do post quality content (status, image, video, articles,etc) regularly but they don't see that engagement which they want to. And more than 90% of time (what I have seen, not tested anywhere though) what happens is that their timing of making posts doesn't go with their fans. One should try to find out when their fans are active and engaging, as this would help them to increase their reach more and for better.
Examining different sectors tends to be tricky because of how Facebook defines them within the system. However, in general, we saw this decrease happen to the industries we monitor.
I agree with timing, as long as it is used to supplement excellent content. We often think of it as, what kind of content would they be interested in on the subway? On their mobile device standing in line at lunch? Time those periods up with content strategy.
I am extremely impressed from this Case Study. But still something is missing to gain reach.
Learned a lot from this post. Thanks. I hope there can be a follow up post of how the suggestions actually fared for specific pages.
Really interesting post Chad and nicely written, thanks!
I still prefer twitter over facebook, even when i know that facebook will be the future ..
Good post!
It is always nice to get valid information on how to improve in the SMM field!
Hi Chad,
Great information! I'm attempting to find the reason behind the Facebook page I'm managing having 1700+ likes and for one post to only reach on average 9-15 people. Do you have any ideas as to why this is happening? There is an option on whether to follow the page or not. I thought that might be the problem. However, I'm managing a separate Facebook page with 850 likes and post reach (organic) anywhere from 100 to 15000. I've liked the page too and I'm sure I didn't have to opt into a follow option. Please advise. Thank you!
That was worth read and i truly agree on all the points you have shared with us and i really feels that, Now i have moved 2-3 steps upwards in promoting brand's Facebook pages. With that, i really cant stop myself to share a research which i performed on a SEO Service in India's official brand page on Sep, 27, 2015. I request you to please have a look at this and your feedbacks on the same are most welcome, here https://www.seoserviceinindia.co.in/Blog/how-to-inc...
Again, thanks for sharing a wonderful post with us @ChadWittman :)
Excellent article, I continue learning more and more in this Seo, thank you very much for your contributions, I will continue investigating on the subject in different places to continue learning and updating, good luck
what does mean MEMES?
This has a lot of great information..//
The organic reach for business and fan pages is an absolute shocker now on facebook and if everybody stood up to facebook and took their business elsewhere I'm they would have rethink things. Maybe its time to check out https://www.jottar.com who does not charge a cent for posts to reach their fans in the newsfeed.
Thanks for sharing nice post .Most of the Facebook page (or other social accounts) admins do post quality content (status, image, video, articles,etc) regularly but they don't see that engagement which they want to.
Just a note, your global responsive img tag needs a "height:auto;" declaration to stop the images from distorting.
well this is really painful to see facebook pages that you have nurtured with your time and devotion to get real likes get down...
I disagree with few part of your article...thou I agree few points
Facebook haven't done anything new this is marketing tactics where every good things that are free comes to end and Facebook has brought up these changes to promote paid campaigns..I have page that have followed majority of your guidelines yet it is still going down in terms of reach...your observations are great but my observation disagrees with few points.
My observation to get better reach has only one point or answer..
Engagement ,engagement and engagement..
I have quiz page with very limited number of likes...its reach has increased a lot by just adding one thing i.e. "?"
The answer to Facebook is posting "?" ...
questions can be simple as "where are your from?"
what you like most etc etc
Thank you for this analysis - it's nice to hear some pages benefit from the changes when we usually hear only about how bad the changes have been for brands.
I'm curious about pages like Jesus Daily which have only gotten more aggressive with their CTAs. I'd love to see how the top pages were affected.
I like Ben's comments. Facebook is a lot like Google - the changes have gotten more sophisticated over time as it's gotten more competitive and they want to keep their users which means getting rid of spam or low quality content. What used to have no effect on rankings can now kill you and destroy your online business. I had to specialize and get out of SEO because it's so much to keep up on and I didn't want to harm my clients.
What's challenging about Facebook is what works for one community can bomb in another. I love/hate this! You really have to know your audience and give them what they want (which is sometimes tough to figure out). When you see what works, do that and don't follow others advice on what to do. In other words, pictures only work for a page you looked at, so for them they are doing the best thing - and it's paid off when a lot of pages are suffering.
Blog on
Janet
Actually, i don't think its that hard.
We recently did an experiment. Well... if you can call it an experiment.
Just post every day at least 2 updates on the hours your reach is the highest.
After a month, you'll get a pretty good idea what works and what not.
Stuff you can try
- reshares of anything (photo, video, links, audio, ...)
- highly respected blogposts or articles within your niche that help others
- documentaries (oh yes, they work very nice)
- some regular news to spice things up
After a while,
you'll get a good picture what works and what doesn't.
Simple songs on videos works like h*ll for our record label for instance.
It matches our vision too.
If you're stuck on ideas,
list all affinities that would fit your niche
find content, anything, start share & see what happens.
You'll see.
Great post, Chad! It's really annoying hearing page owners whine about having to pay for organic reach. Clearly it's not "organic" if you're paying for it lol. Organic reach, like most search engines, is getting more competitive by the day, simply because there's a growing number of users that are constantly pumping out content and there's no way for FB to show every post from every page you follow every time you login. The way I see it, it's really not so different from how Google ranks and displays content: highest visibility goes to highest quality (in this case based on engagement metrics) or highest bid.
Facebook completely does my head in! I realise one should not get stale in marketing and administering pages, but with all the changes! Being a tiny brand its tough out there to get engagement and reach anyway.
So, basically, they realised that just status update with no graphics of any kind made a page look boring, so they have swung back the other way with photos scoring better again.
Thanks for the share of research :)
For the small brands, the bar continues to rise. If you believe that your business could benefit from social media marketing (not all brands reap the same opportunity), then keep grinding it out!
It is not really my topic - I am not such a "facebook nerd" when I have to decide - check facebook or google plus I usually take a look at google.
But I am not the mass - in germany there are so many facebook users and google plus is growing now because of the youtube community.
I also saw many clients wich now have less traffic from facebook. But when I take a look at the study - it is like "allways the same thing" to gain...
Engagement will always be the "trick" to beating the algorithm. The key is optimizing this engagement process. As we evolve in our recommendations, the trick becomes what to post - when. How can we use human psychology to improve engagement. This is something that interests me long term.
Chad, looks a great informative chat about Facebook, but some times the page admins are don't know may be don't want how it's work or how should. Only focus on post, share etc.. who care how much they are on right track. I hope this post will help to them and even me too to running a great campaign with Facebook or other social media channels.
Great post Chad. I’m no “Facebook nerd”, but I’ve recently endured a hit from Facebook around January 12. Our reach wasn’t affected when the announcement in December was pushed out. So, it looks like they took action in phases. Regardless, the change is a bit heart-breaking for us because we’ve worked hard to attract over 3M fans over the course of the last couple years. Pre-algo change we had 3M+ PTAT and now we’re down to 1.2M (about a 59% drop in exact figures). We’ve continued to supply content that our fans loved, and we saw that based on engagement factors including Likes, Shares and Comments. So this change… sucks.
I’m curious… with your study on Page A and Page B, are these pages of similar industries / fan counts? I’m a little baffled with one of your conclusions being “don’t ask for engagement” as we’ve always seen more engagement when we ask for it – and often that led to great exposure and reach. Be interested to hear what you have to say on this topic.
Jan 12 is an interesting date. We were contacted by several big brands around that date that had a similar story to you—no change around Dec 2nd, but decrease around Jan 12. I'm starting to think this is more than a coincidence.
We're seeing engagement hold pretty steady for most brands, are you seeing this as well?
Pages A & B were meant to be loose unofficial observations to be shared, while I study the issue deeper. Not asking for engagement is a tough one. It surely can be done properly, but needs to be well thought out. The answer is not to simply add a question mark at the end of every post or ask mundane questions. If you feel you can do it well, then go for it!
Very surprised to hear some people had dramatic increases in organic reach/engagement rate, etc. Hadn't heard this side of the story post Facebook update. I'm sending this data over to the social and content departments right now. :)
Nicely covered Chad about every angle of statistics - Wanna to more visits with organic search.
Chad, great post with good stuff (loved the 7 tips to gain reach) that you share with us.
Something I would like Facebook to start penalized (like they did with memes) is mathematical puzzles. I mean... c'mon! And those are also starting to show like crazy in my LinkedIn news feed as well...
Thank for the great insides you provide :D
Thank you for the interesting case study, this has a lot of great informations
Thanks for the great post. We have seen and experienced both A and B while not doing anything really different on our pages. Do you think/believe that Facebook considers "Read more: link" as a call to action? Thanks in advance for your reply.
Your Case Study is great ..some people often think that because Facebook is a few years old now EdgeRank will settle down. But that's never going to be the case, partly because Facebook will always be learning more about how we interact with the site and partly because they will always be changing the way we interact with it like sponsored posts and the introduction of cover images are good examples of this.