Facebook page administrators witnessed another loss – steep loss over the last few months – in total reach and organic reach. For any page, the Facebook page management is the only role that needs to know the organic reach and the value of it to justify the spending and to keep growing the audience. For every ad spend, it will be critical to understand the changes Facebook is making to their ads and their platform as a whole. These changes will affect how Facebook pages operate, and it is necessary to understand how. This is why we are creating this Facebook content performance overview. This Facebook content overview will try to cover the changes that have happened, why these changes are important and how owners of Facebook pages can alter their content to adapt to these changes and be more visible.
Engagement and Reach in Facebook Pages
There are two main metrics Facebook was focused on: engagement and reach, and these two were the most significant when it came to the performance of any page. While engagement on Facebook is visible from comments, likes, shares, and other visible interaction, reach is more confusing as this is an aggregation of all the traffic sources in one metric presented to the administrator.
Any user can regard a post as being seen simply because they saw it in their feed. This user can also be a responder to the post, a user that viewed a respondent’s feed, or a viewer of the post through paid promotion.
📊 Organic Reach
It is when the users see the post without any advertising or spending money on distribution. It is the result of the actual audience, their connections, and other individuals in the network.
💰 Paid Reach
It is when the users see a post as a result of advertising.
📈 Total Reach
It is the total of both organic and paid impressions.
What Changed in Facebook’s Algorithm
Key Update: On December 2, 2013 Facebook made an update that assigned more importance to quality link content and less visibility to low quality and meme posts. This caused organic reach to decline immediately for many pages, sometimes significantly.
Overall, the majority lost some amount of reach, even if not every page suffered large declines.
In February 2022, we discussed the unending trap of Facebook’s organic reach and how to escape it using models. By that time and to this day, the reach trap had already been trending downward. This is not concerning. It has already been established that in the previous years, the organic reach trap had been trending downwards due to how organic reach works, competition in the platform and more recent, how the Facebook platform works. As more posts are contending for the same space in news feeds, Facebook’s algorithms become “tuned” to priorities such as relevance, authenticity and/or true user value. All the recent updates have simply and possibly overwhelmingly raised the floor for all Facebook pages to post. It has become more difficult to sustain the same outreach without expending more effort strategically. This has been the trend in the previous years and is not new.
Recent Changes And Users’ Adjusted Engagement
Facebook has been explaining the so called changes in their algorithms primarily looking at it through the users’ experience. Facebook’s goal has been to not lose engagement while eliminating what is perceived to be “bad engagement” or “low value” without going completely passive on user engagement.
Contact with engagement data pre and post update, changes did occur, yet nothing suggested a major change in overall engagement loss. Engagement levels did the complete opposite with participation levels considerably higher on posts that had been served.
What Content Types Performed best
Analysts tracking performance movements before and after the rollout of the algorithm saw and continued to see strong organics for traditional status updates, but not for every page, and there were moves in some pages from lower to higher organics. There were also some pages where a movement from lower to higher reach was offset by lower moves in other pages.
There was a Certain Pattern
❌ Suffered Adversely
The pages that most suffered were the ones that had overtly and aggressively solicited user engagement by repeatedly asking people to like, comment, or share.
✅ Positively Impacted
On the other hand, pages that were more focused on adding some value and not simply asking for engagement, were the ones that had a slight positive movement.
The data supported Facebook’s previously stated goal to limit engagement bait and promote the reach of meaningful, quality content.
What It Means for Page Owners Looking Ahead
What these pages that performed the best also had in common was that they managed to not rely too heavily on low quality meme content and also had more subtle calls to action. With Facebook’s continued absence of low quality tactics, any brand using low quality tactics to reach the ‘high’ end of the reach ladder is increasingly exposed to being penalised.
🎯 The Sustainable Strategy
Even though it is less risk, the most sustainable competitive advantage for page owners is investing in true, meaningful, and deserving content that will continue to be worth sharing as Facebook alters their algorithms.
Key Takeaway
Page that prioritize authentic and genuine engagement will be the ones to gain from Facebook’s upgrades in the news feed. Spend on genuine content, steer clear from engagement bait, and foster genuine relationships with your audience.
