Here at Online Social Butterfly, we have been busy working on revised strategies after the massive changes that Facebook made at the end of 2013. These changes related to organic reach.
Organic reach is the number of your likers or fans that will see a post from your page without you paying to boost it. The graph below shows the decline in organic reach. Facebook uses an algorithm that determines what will appear in people’s newsfeeds. The purpose of this algorithm is to give the user the best possible experience every time they are on Facebook. However, this has been to the detriment of Facebook business pages.
The dramatic changes that Facebook made to its algorithm meant that many strategies that business pages were using were no longer effective in ensuring good organic reach. As the graph above illustrates, organic reach was sitting at around 6% on average. If you had worked hard on growing your fan base on your Facebook page, this was not good news.
Many of us in the social media arena have now tried and tested different strategies to improve the organic reach of our own and our client’s pages. This has been a big learning curve but with some great results to report.
My business Facebook page – Online Social Butterfly has excellent organic reach. Mine currently sits at around 16%. This is almost three times what a regular business page can reasonably expect to achieve.
If you would like to know how to determine the average organic reach, Facebook has made it really simple. On your business Facebook page at the top left hand side are a number of pages. One of these is titled Insights. Under this tab, you will find a sub-heading titled Reach. It is here that you will find information about organic and paid reach on your page.
I have taken a screen shot from my page to show you organic reach. This graph is titled Post Reach and will show you both organic and paid reach so you need to select on the right hand side Organic. Once this is ticked, you will only be looking at organic reach.
My latest stats show that my organic reach is 310. This means that over the period shown, 310 people on average have seen any given post. This number on its own is fairly meaningless. You need to then see this as a percentage of your total fans. On my page, I have 1936 fans. This means that as a percentage my organic reach is 310 / 1936. This gives us 16%. Measuring this against benchmarks and industry averages, this is extremely high (see my earlier graph which indicates the average organic reach is just over 6%).
I hope you have found this useful. I think that it is really important to understand that Facebook is a marketing tool and that we must measure our activities on it to see how we are performing.
If you have enjoyed this newsletter, click here to sign up to my weekly Facebook wrap up. It comes out every Monday and is dedicated to Facebook and helping you use it better in your business.
