Feeling alone out there? If you’re wondering why your Facebook organic reach has dwindled to seemingly nothing in the past few years, you’re not alone, and you’re not the only business owner who’s stressing out about it. Facebook has even openly admitted that they’ve changed their algorithm to lower organic reach, in an effort to only show people the content in which they are most interested. Gone is the Golden Era of reaching 70-80% of the folks who hit “Like” on your page. Gone are the days of 800 likes on a status update without even trying. Facebook is pay-to-play nowadays, and no, we shouldn’t be miffed. Imagine putting a commercial on television for free, or an ad in a magazine without dipping into your pockets – crazy, right? If you think about it, Facebook made a clever play by giving away native ad space for free to small businesses in the first place, and it’s still pretty amazing that reaching 1000 people on Facebook still averages 25 cents, where you’d pay $30+ for the same reach with newspaper.

So what happened to organic reach? Facebook is protecting its users from over-zealous advertisers, because at its core, “organic” basically means free advertising. If a page posts content that people naturally engage with – like, comment, share, click – Facebook will loosen its reigns and increase the reach, or number of people’s newsfeeds that content shows up in. A page can really damage itself by posting strictly advertorial posts, because people will not engage with this content, Facebook will see this, and then it will penalize the page into 2-3% organic reach oblivion.  So if you want high organic reach, make sure to target people to like your page that are definitely interested in the type of content you plan to post about. Once you have this audience, don’t post about how great your business is, post about interesting things that your followers followed you for in the first place. Make your content interesting, and people will engage with it! This will cause a ominod effect, where Facebook sees that you’re posting great content. This will cause your organic reach to increase, which will allow even more people to engage.