According to a study by SocialFlow, publishers and other media companies are seeing a 42% drop in Reach per post on Facebook. ‘Reach’ includes any activity on your posts including sharing, liking and commenting.

SocialFlow kept hearing from their clients about Reach declining on Facebook since Facebook launched its new News Feed algorithm earlier this year. Their study looked at 3,000 publisher/media companies’ Facebook pages and the reach of posts over the last year.

Jim Anderson, CEO of SocialFlow, discussed their new discoveries in a Live Facebook chat:

Anderson stated, “Starting in February we saw the Reach sort of dip and then plateau and its been relatively flat since that time. That correlates annotations that you have heard from people anecdotally that their Reach was not what it had been before.

If you really want to understand what’s going on you’ve got to say well that was the Reach we got, 42 billion back in January, but how many posts did it actually take to get that reach? What’s the oomph for each post that you get? You see the data (below), this is the number of social posts over time:

If you take Reach and divide by the number of posts you get a Reach per Post metric. How many posts did it take to get you that reach? That’s what the slide below is showing:

Per Anderson in the video, “What we see is that back in January post were getting on average a 120,000 Reach and now we are down to around 70,000 in just the span of about 5 months. That’s a 42% drop in Reach! This is evidence in part of Facebook’s algorithmic changes.”

Is there anything publishers can do to improve their Reach on Facebook?

Anderson offered this advice: “What you want to do is some experimentation with the types of content, your posting frequency, live video, video in general and are you too heavy with images. Facebook algorithms are constantly being adjusted and what performs well with your audience as a media company are going to have to be determined.”

Watch the full video here: