[WHY] Your reach on Facebook is lower than ever

Wonder why your reach on Facebook is going so low?

"The Algorithm, 'Duardo I need the Algorithm.". This quote is from "The Social Network", the marvelous and famous movie from the marvelous David Fincher. As you all may know, it's dealing with the genesis of Facebook, the beginning of the Social Medias era. And "the Algorithm", as Jesse Eisenberg (who's playing Mark Zuckerberg)  said in the movie, is the mathematics formula they're using to create a new website, just for fun, called FaceMatch.com, which allows you to rate girls from Harvard. Nothing to do with the reach yet, but we'll come to it.

In the context of our article, the algorithm is the formula Facebook is using to make everything work on your news-feed, basically. What you're going to see first, at what moment, what are your friends commenting, etc. And this said algorithm recently went through an update that pretty much messed things up for business page owners.

Here's why. If you don't know about it yet, the Facebook algorithm made your friends & relatives posts/commenting/or any sort of Facebook activities priority, with the possibility to "unfollow" people you don't want to get news about. OK, that sounds cool. More informations from people you actually wanna here from. Great. But there's a trap. A big one. This effing update makes business pages non priority, resulting in the reach to decrease and decrease and decrease until it goes right through the center of the Earth...

It basically means that people will be less likely to see an awesome news you're posting about your company/product/projects than a video of a monkey pooping on another monkey that some 13 year old kid shared the same day. Outrageous right?!

There are, however, some solutions for you, oh dear business pages owners compatriots.

The first solution is simple. But not totally a good news. You have to pay Facebook for your reach to skyrocket again. Yeah. Pay. Money. Money you earned with your sweat, your time and your energy. Aggravating right? But don't worry, you won't have to spend your whole monthly turnover on a single post. The most common task is to boost some of your most important posts, it will allow you to reach more people, and when I say more I'm talking about twice or even three times the organic reach you got (the reach you obtain without paying). Boosting these posts won't cost you more than 5 to 20 €/$ if you're a new player on social medias with a little amount of fans. For example, you could use this feature to increase your reach on important news about your company, such as new products launches, telling people when you're hiring, great promotions/discounts on products, or even corporate communications (videos, interviews, articles...). The decision to pay or not is yours, but remember that this algorithm is definitely going to update again, and who knows, maybe the reach will be crushed down even more in the future.

Another solution comes from your community habits. If your posts are engaging and people often tend to like them, comment on them or, even better, share them, well you can sleep soundly. Because with people reacting on your posts one way or another, the algorithm actually plays in your favor. Your publications will appear on news-feeds as much as they did before because you are retrieved by REAL people, and as we said before, the algorithm prioritizes them over pages. If your community is not that kind with you, well you gotta start yourself some questions. Your posts might not get their attention, or worse, they might not appeal to them at all. Ergo you won't be shared, ergo your posts won't appear anywhere, ergo your reach is going to decrease faster than the number of people playing Pokemon GO today, ergo you're screwed and you will have to pay in order to survive in this big bad "Facebook jungle".

The conclusion to this is : Facebook is a company. Not a benevolent service. So they have to make money. And this change in the algorithm will "force" business page owners to pay a lil bit of their money on each post just for their reach not to crash down. Soooo, business is business? Let's juste hope the next step is not making us pay just to keep our page alive... let's hope.

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I'm out 😉