Facebook is showing Pages’ organic posts to fewer and fewer people as time goes on.
Have you noticed a dramatic drop in the visibility of your own posts? Let us know in the comments.
As you may know, in December, the company pushed out an algorithm change to its News Feed, which severely impacted the organic reach for many Pages, but recent research from Ogilvy shows it was already getting bad before that, and is on a steady path downward with reach as low as 6% of Pages’ audiences by last month.
Now, Sam Biddle at Gawker’s Valleywag is reporting that it’s about to drop even further:
A source professionally familiar with Facebook’s marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is “in the process of” slashing “organic page reach” down to 1 or 2 percent. That would mean an advertising giant like Nike, which has spent a great deal of internet effort collecting over 16 million Facebook likes, would only be able to affect of around a 160,000 of them when it pushes out a post. Companies like Gawker, too, rely on gratis Facebook propagation for a huge amount of their audience.
As Biddle notes, the less likes a Page has, the fewer that number will be. Good luck getting any visibility if you don’t have many.
“That 160,000 still sounds like a lot of people, sure,” he writes. “But how about my favorite restaurant here in New York, Pies ‘n’ Thighs, which has only 3,281 likes—most likely locals who actually care about updates from a nearby restaurant? They would reach only a few dozen customers. A smaller business might only reach one. This also assumes the people ‘reached’ bother to even look at the post.”
This comes just a couple days after Forrester’s principal analyst said brands and agencies are also becoming “disillusioned” with Facebook’s advertising products as well, opting to try out other social sites.
Still, eMarketer is reporting that Facebook is gaining significant market share in the global ad market.
Facebook hasn’t exactly been shy about its strategy of organic reach reduction. Arrogant maybe, but not shy. Here’s what the company said in a sales deck Ad Age obtained in December:
We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.
Meaningful, eh? Meaningful as in not showing users posts from the Pages that they specified to Facebook that they “like”? Oh, they must have meant meaningful to Facebook.
Meanwhile, Facebook is making the News Feed more “meaningful” by adding content from Pages users haven’t even liked. With a recent redesign to the News Feed, they also removed the option to view by “most recent,” making the method to the madness all the more cryptic. At least they’re testing a “stories you might have missed” feature, though the only reason you’re missing them is that Facebook isn’t showing them to you to begin with.
Is Facebook taking the right approach with organic reach in the News Feed? Let us know what you think.
Image via Ogilvy