Why ‘Free’ Facebook Posts Will Soon Become a Waste of Time as Organic Reach Plumbs New Depths.
Have you noticed just how quickly the visibility of non-promoted posts from your Facebook business page has plummeted over the last couple of years?
Is your audience reach tipped to drop even lower in the very near future?
Could posting a ‘free’ update soon become a total waste of time, and is there any way back from Pay to Play Facebook?
It was good while it lasted.
But the days of reaching out to your loyal Facebook business page followers with completely ‘free’ or ‘organic’ posts finally seem to be over.
You may remember a time when Facebook was telling us that the platform was a wonderful way to build up a new audience and engage with your prospective customers.
But you’ll now have to pay for promoted posts if you want any hope of reaching out to that audience you spent so long on building up from scratch.
Over the last two years alone, the audience reach of a typical ‘free’ Facebook post from a business page has already plummeted from 16% of your followers to a mere 6%.
But here’s another slice of bad news;
A reliable source close to Facebook has recently indicated that the world’s most popular Social Media platform is now working hard on slashing that organic reach down to as little as just 1%.
So, 99 in 100 of your Facebook fans will completely miss every free post you make in the future.
Before I go any further, I should quickly stress that the average personal Facebook user will not be impacted in any way by the ever-dwindling reach of organic posts. This only affects businesses and brands that are trying to communicate with all those fans who willingly clicked on the ‘LIKE’ button of a Facebook page.
But is all this fair on business pages?
Well, it doesn’t always feel like it, and some might argue that we’ve been misled.
Over the last few years, Martin Print has invested an enormous amount of time and expense into building up a healthy audience on Facebook, and I’m happy to report that our page is currently followed by just over 6,900 people.
We felt that heavily promoting Facebook-exclusive deals was a powerful way to;
1) Introduce fellow businesses to our results-driven print and design services.
2) Permanently connect with a big online audience after they have happily chosen to follow our regular updates, news, special offers, and random nutty offerings.
Although we’ve generated some incredible results from Facebook, the second part of that strategy has taken an unexpected twist.
After already investing resources in building up our own Facebook audience, we’re now forced to invest further resources into paying for a promoted post every single time we want to communicate with them.
This is despite the fact that each and every follower willingly chose to connect with us and view our communications.
It appears as if Facebook are standing in the middle of these mutually agreed connections, and holding each side to ransom!
It used to be the case that you could still generate a healthy organic response from a free post if enough followers engaged with the content via a Like or a Comment, but even this concept seems have fallen by the wayside.
The truth of the matter is that free Facebook posts are rapidly developing into an utterly fruitless activity, and you’ll now have to pay for promoted posts if you want your content to be seen by more than just a tiny fraction of your followers.
Of course, we should remember that Facebook itself is a business and will naturally be seeking to exploit opportunities to generate revenue from other businesses.
Some might also argue that the average Facebook user wants to see more personal content in their news feed and less marketing content from business pages.
This dramatic fall in organic reach ensures that only paid marketing content is allowed to seep through into the news feed, and the average user is less likely to get bombarded with endless free posts from pages.
(However, this argument doesn’t really take into account the fact that the personal user can very easily ‘Unlike’ a page if they ever get annoyed by the updates!)
But my main concern here is that it’s the owners of smaller businesses on tighter budgets who are more likely to feel the impact of having to pay extra for promotion or face zero visibility.
So, what can we do about it?
Abandon Ship?
It’s been rumoured in some quarters that Google is dancing in delight as the company predicts a big wave of business owners to switch loyalties to the struggling Google+ platform.
It’s certainly true that some disgruntled business owners are choosing to abandon Facebook and look elsewhere for Social Media Marketing results.
But we shouldn’t get too carried away here. We’re certainly not going to see Facebook lose its global grip anytime soon, and abandoning the platform altogether could be a reckless and costly move.
Facebook is still phenomenally popular and now boasts over a billion active users. The game is not going to change just because some businesses wander off to go and play with Google+ instead.
However, by all means, check out the competition and expand your Social Media presence, as putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
There are unique advantages and strengths attached to other Social Media platforms which may help your business capture unique chunks of the market.
So, go forth and explore the popular alternatives – from Google + to Twitter, from Pinterest to LinkedIn, and beyond.
Less is More
After the ranting and raving about the injustice of it all has subsided, a practical solution for moving forward with Facebook is to think about seriously reducing your content to the stuff that matters.
It’s worth bearing in mind that it doesn’t cost a fortune for a smaller business to achieve much bigger visibility with a modestly promoted post.
But if you’ve got into the habit of making frequent posts from your Facebook page, these costs will quickly add up if you’re planning on promoting everything.
In the past, I’ve advised fellow business owners to promote the genuinely important updates to guarantee high visibility and leave the more lightweight and entertaining posts to achieve natural free organic growth.
But those days looks set to disappear forever, and there now seems little point in publishing non-promoted Facebook posts at all.
It saddens me a little to say that some of the fun may now have been squeezed out of Facebook business pages, as it would be a big waste of time to carry on posting non-essential free posts that nobody will ever see.
From now on, it makes more sense to post – and pay for – fewer updates of a far more indispensable nature.
So, what do you make of the tumbling reach of free posts on Facebook?
Will you be tempted to change your strategy or even consider shifting your focus onto a completely different Social Media platform?
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