If you’ve been active on Facebook for a couple of years, you’ve probably seen a huge drop in Facebook reach and performance.
It’s fair to say that everyone wants their posts to reach as many people as possible, even though it has become a big challenge for most.
The only way to do this is to understand what affects your Facebook reach and to set up good practices. Luckily, you’re in the right place. We have all the info you need to identify how you can achieve better performance on your Facebook posts. We understand… Sometimes it can feel like you’re all alone out there!
But we’ve got you covered. In this article, we’ll strive to:
- Tell you what Facebook reach is
- Explain what affects your Facebook reach
- Detail how you can track and measure Facebook reach
- Give you a plan of action to increase your Facebook reach
What is Facebook reach exactly?
Reach is the number of people who saw any content from your Facebook page.
Impressions represent the number of times any content from your Facebook page appeared on someone’s feed.
Page views are the number of times a Facebook page has been viewed by people, regardless of whether they’re logged in or not.
Facebook is known to constantly roll out new features to improve the experience for its users.
After all, they make most of their money from advertising, so anything that keeps people on their app and encourages businesses to spend more is good for them.
Of course, there’s a reason why their stock price has continuously improved since the organic reach of business pages diminished.
A few years back, they started rolling out features that literally destroyed the reach of Facebook pages. It is said that most pages reach around 6% of their total fans (even less on some occasions).
Facebook reach is the number of unique individuals who saw your posts on Facebook. It’s a metric that affects your engagement, likes, clicks, and so on. Why? If people don’t see your posts, they can’t interact with them.
It’s different from impressions, which count the number of times your posts were seen, including multiple views by the same person. Facebook reach only counts unique views.
What are the types of Facebook reach?
- Post reach
- Page reach
- Organic reach
- Viral reach
- Paid reach
Post reach and page reach are probably the most important reach metrics out there. Your post reach is the number of people who saw a particular post from your page in their news feed, and your page reach is the number of people who saw any posts from your page during a specific period of time (daily, weekly, or monthly).
These two metrics can sometimes be intertwined. In some cases, you’ll have a post with a lot of reach, but a low reach on your overall page. You might, on the contrary, have tons of posts with bad reach, but together they give you a big page reach.
The big question remains, which one should you focus on? To answer this, you should think of this question like the following: do you want to reach as many unique people as possible or just reach the same individuals more regularly? By answering this question, you’ll be able to choose the most important metric for your company.
Inside your Facebook page’s reach and post reach, there are two categories of Facebook reach:
Organic reach
Paid reach
Organic reach is the reach given by Facebook for free. It’s when your fans see your posts in their news feeds. They can see your posts in their news feed, but also by going to your page and looking for your latest posts.
Inside organic reach, there are two types of reach:
- Viral reach
- Non viral reach
Viral reach refers to people who see your posts because somebody else shared them. For instance, one of your fans shares your post, and 10 of their friends see the post in question, even though they aren’t fans of your page.
The same happens when you launch a Facebook ad to reach a larger audience. You might get someone who is not your fan to share your post, and their friends will see it as well.
Non-viral reach represents the people who saw your posts directly from the posts you’ve made. These are generally people who are already following your page and see your post either in their news feed or by going directly to your Facebook page.
Finally, paid reach is essentially the reach of individual posts that you paid Facebook to promote. Since you pay to promote them, you can have access to a lot of data and reports, such as demographics data, engagement rates, etc. With paid reach, you should get unlimited reach (unless you’ve reached 1.6B people).
One thing that seems a tad more complicated is the timeframe around the reach (1-day, 7-day, and 28-day).
For example, a user can see your content once today and once tomorrow, but with a 1-day increment, you’ll have two unique reaches instead of the accurate one. This is why we always recommend choosing a 7-day or 28-day window to track Facebook reach.
What are the reach factors?
- Previous interaction with person or page: How often a user has interacted with the person or page before.
- Type of post interacted with: Whether the post was a photo, video, text, or link, as certain types tend to receive more engagement.
- Initial interaction pool: The first group of people who see and interact with the post, which influences how widely it’s distributed.
- High positivity score: The amount of positive feedback (likes, shares, comments) a post receives, indicating its popularity.
- Time decay attributes: How recently the post was published, as older posts naturally lose visibility over time.
Why does Facebook only allow certain content to reach people’s newsfeed? Why doesn’t Facebook just show, in chronological order, the latest posts from the people and pages you follow?
There are two reasons:
- Facebook makes almost all their money from paid advertising.
- The better and more high-quality their news feed is, the more people will stay.
The more people go and stay in the news feed, the more money Facebook makes. In other words, the better the user experience, the more ad space Facebook can sell.
The goal is to show just the right amount of new, relevant, and personalized content in the user’s news feed. With new ads and posts appearing every day, Facebook is forced to filter for quality.
When you browse your Facebook feed, you might look at 30 posts, and if you don’t like them, you probably won’t come back. That’s why it’s crucial to create the best experience for the user.
In 2010, your Facebook reach was quite simple. It depended on three factors, collectively known as “Edgerank”:
- Affinity Score: The relationship between the user and the person or page posting. If you’ve interacted with them before, their posts are more likely to appear in your feed.
- Edge Weight: The type of content (photo, video, text, etc.). Certain types of posts are given more weight based on how much engagement they typically generate.
- Time Decay: The age of the post. The older the post, the less likely it is to appear in your feed unless it’s getting a lot of engagement.
If you scored the highest in these factors, your posts would show up first. Those who understood the factors were constantly winning space in the news feed.
Others, who didn’t understand them, were spending a lot of energy without gaining much traction. This applied equally to both Facebook pages and personal profiles.
Today, there are more than 100 factors that Facebook considers to show your post to your audience. No one wants a gigantic checklist before making a single Facebook post, of course!
Edgerank still matters, but additional factors have been introduced over the years.
Factor #1 – If you interacted with person or page
For instance, if you consistently like, comment on, or click every link whenever you post on your page, it’s safe to say that these users have a strong affinity for your content. Based on this behavior, Facebook’s algorithm assumes you want to see more posts from those individuals or pages, prioritizing their content in your feed.
Conversely, if you haven’t interacted with certain people or Facebook pages in a while, you’ll likely start seeing them less frequently. However, there are times when you may wish to see posts from them without engaging directly. This limitation highlights a fundamental flaw in Facebook’s algorithm; it can overlook the nuances of user preferences.
Additionally, consider that Facebook’s algorithms are continually evolving, attempting to strike a balance between user engagement and content relevance. As a result, it can sometimes lead to frustrating experiences where you miss out on posts that genuinely interest you. To combat this, actively engaging with a diverse range of content can help diversify your feed and ensure you don’t miss out on valuable updates.
Ultimately, while the algorithm aims to enhance user experience by tailoring content to individual preferences, it’s not perfect. Staying engaged and actively seeking out content that matters to you can help bridge that gap.
Factor #2 – The type of posts you interact with
This point is pretty straightforward: you might interact more with videos than with images. As a result, Facebook will prioritize video content over image content from the people and pages you follow.
For instance, Facebook videos were already taking up almost 82% of the Facebook feed in 2018—imagine how much more prevalent they are today in 2024.
That’s why we recommend all our clients use videos. Most people engage more with this type of content, and as a bonus, Facebook often charges less to reach those audiences.
Factor #3 – Initial interaction pool
When you make a post on your Facebook page, Facebook initially shows it to a small group of people, typically ranging from 25 to 100. This initial audience will determine the fate of your Facebook reach.
If they interact with your post, you will receive a higher score in Facebook’s algorithm, allowing you to reach more people over time. This is why it’s crucial to post content that sparks conversations. If you even ask your most engaged followers to like your post once it’s live, you significantly increase your chances of reaching a broader audience.
Factor #4 – Keeping a high positivity score
While the quality score no longer exists, the perception people have of your posts still matters. Users can choose to hide your posts from their Facebook newsfeed, which can significantly impact your reach.
For instance, if you post something provocative and receive a lot of comments like “I don’t want to see this,” it will negatively affect your Facebook reach.
On the flip side, positive feedback will lead to a higher score, allowing you to reach more people. Positive feedback can come from actions such as people sharing your post, spending time watching your video, or even saving your post for later.
Factor #5 – Time decay
As time goes on, the score of your post decreases. Essentially, the longer a post remains on your feed, the lower its score becomes. This decline is a natural part of Facebook’s algorithm, which favors fresh, timely content over older posts.
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to prevent this gradual decrease in visibility once the post has been made. Understanding this factor is crucial because it emphasizes the importance of posting regularly and strategically to maintain engagement with your audience.
For instance, if you notice a post performing well initially, it’s beneficial to leverage that momentum. You can encourage your audience to engage by prompting them to share, comment, or ask questions. Moreover, consider creating follow-up content or engaging in discussions related to that post to keep the conversation alive.
Ultimately, recognizing that your posts will lose visibility over time allows you to plan your content calendar more effectively. This way, you can continually introduce new posts that capture your audience’s attention while capitalizing on the engagement of older content for as long as it remains relevant.
How can you measure Facebook reach?
Back in the days, we were measuring the reach of our posts based on the total amount of fans, and this would give us a satisfying number. The problem is, nowadays, if you do that, you’ll fall off your chair. You would probably get 0.4%…
Facebook Insights give you access to numerous metrics inside the Business Manager. If you have a business page, then you can go under Insights and select reach.
The best way to analyze your reach is to compare it to your own benchmark. You can select a graph and see, for instance, your organic reach.
You’ll then be able to gauge your posts’ performance against the other posts. In a way, your total reach doesn’t matter because it depends on the quality of your Facebook page.
For those who still believe so, your Facebook reach is not the amount of fans you have on your page. It’s only a fraction of your fans that should see your post in a non-viral way. If you are lucky, you might get organic viral reach and paid reach.
How hard is it to improve your Facebook reach?
Since 2013, there has been a drastic drop in Facebook reach. Today, it’s been 7 years marketers don’t seem to care about organic Facebook reach anymore. The drop took quite some time to arise, for a few years, some pages were still successful but they got rarer by the years.
An article in AdAge also said that Facebook told them the reach would keep diminishing. It’s essentially Facebook saying if you want Facebook reach, you’ve gotta pay to play.
Fortunately, the pages with the highest post engagement were less affected. Pages with tons of negative feedback but high engagement were hit hard. This move made sense because Facebook wants to keep users on the platform.
All this beautiful history to say that everybody is affected, but if you are able to create a community of people who don’t hide your post and actually interact positively. You might gain Facebook’s love again and generate more organic reach.
Can I find better reach elsewhere?
Of course, when the Facebook reach news arrived, people were looking for other avenues. It’s funny to say that some even started saying that Google+ was the new social platform. Today we know it isn’t because it closed down.
It’s fair to say that other social networks could be good to use such as Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and so on. When it comes to reaching, some would say that Linkedin is the new golden treasure.
The truth is any platform now knows they make their money from paid advertising, organic reach is not their priority unless you get people to positively interact with your page.
A lot of companies started hating Facebook because of the drastic decrease in Facebook reach with the new algorithm. They were saying that they were out of money.
Truth is Facebook isn’t doing such a bad job. They are trying to conciliate their need to keep users online and generating money with their paid advertising features. Of course, the organic reach is dying but the efforts they’ve put in creating one of the best advertising platform in the world is amazing.
When we look at Google who has made tons of algorithm updates such as Panda, Penguin & Hummingbird that have literally made loose tons of traffic to websites that now needed to spend their money on Adwords. The algorithm updates of Facebook don’t seem so bad.
Imagine having a website that brings 10,000 visitors per month and generates $50,000 and then it goes to 1,000 visitors and the company needs to fire employees because they aren’t growing anymore. It takes a lot of time to rank with SEO, a shorter time to build an engaging audience on Facebook.
In our reality at K6, all those social media platforms should be used in an integrated strategy, not in a separate one. Every company should leverage all related social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram & Youtube. A good social media agency can help you accomplish that.
Should you pay for Facebook ads reach?
In reality, some Facebook pages won’t really have a choice if they want to get visibility. Should it make you afraid? No. On the contrary, figuring out paid ads for your company can help you boost sales or generate more leads in a more efficient manager.
In reality, some Facebook posts might deserve to go on paid and others don’t, but for the content that is paid-worthy, it can help you target the right people. If your Facebook reaches the right people then you have a better chance of making money.
The first step in the right direction is to know which type of content you want to promote. Our answer? It depends on your goals. A post about your company being featured somewhere could be awesome if you want to gain credibility but bad if you want to generate sales.
Here are a few objectives companies have:
- Generate as much visibility through viral reach
- Make sales
- Get new prospects
- Connect with their audience
If you spend a lot of time creating a Facebook post such as a video, it might be worth it to consider putting a small budget on it so that people see it.
We’ve gathered a lot of different successful Facebook ads if you want to take a look: Facebook ads example and Facebook video ads examples.
In our experience, it’s nice to put a little budget on almost every post. You might be surprised to find a post that generates amazing results such as cheap clicks or cheap engagement.
You can even aim for the reach objective which would make Facebook optimize to give you the most cost-efficient reach possible. They recommend it for companies that want to build awareness around their brand.
With this objective, you can also set a Facebook ad frequency cap which would maximize the amount of time someone can see your ad. It’s a super useful feature.
7 proven strategies to boost your Facebook reach
If you want to get more Facebook reach, then we have a few recommendations which we are sure will help.
#1 – Evergreen content
The biggest hurdle with posting content is actually creating content. You might start creating really basic Facebook posts, but you’ll realize that your results are really bad and it’s even worth it.
The best solution is to use a source of curated content or using evergreen content you’ve created in the past. Having a library or a bank of Facebook posts is a great idea to never run out of things to post.
#2 – Increase post frequency
The more you post, the better your chance of reaching your audience. Overall, this strategy can have a great impact on your overall reach and brand awareness. Some of the Facebook pages that get the best results usually post more than three times per day.
Posting often can be hard, because creating quality content is a tedious task but if you have a large enough audience it might be worth it because it brings quality results.
For example, this is what happens when you only post once a week and results increase by 106,493%.
The only caveat is that if you post too often and you have a small audience, your posts might compete in the feed for your audiences. The solution is to test for yourself and track your results if you post once a day or three times per day. Data is king.
#3 – Find a content curation strategy
There are literally thousands of websites posting quality content in your industry. While you might not want to make posts from your competitors, you’ll realize that posting their content is still better than not posting anything at all.
Other experts in your industry are posting quality content that could benefit your audience and your audience will thank you for the right resources. This creates a great relationship with them with low efforts.
Although we recommend posting quality content, finding content from other quality sources can do the job as well. It can help position your brand as a thought leader that is always up-to-date with new resources.
As an example, you could post some of your old articles or even articles from other experts that you think your audience would really benefit from.
#4 – Creative posts
When it comes to Facebook posts, you need to stand out and being creative is one of the best way of doing that. The truth is that if people have seen something in particular too often then they won’t look at it anymore.
To be creative and bring new ideas to your Facebook post can really help improve your Facebook reach. Here are a few Facebook post ideas:
- Adding motion design
- Creating podcast/interview video’s
- Celebrate things in your company with your audience
- Craft a nice giveaway
#5 – Post genuine & transparent content
Facebook isn’t a place where you want to be too cold in your posts. In fact, social media is a place for brands to be more personal and transparent to connect with their audience.
Some companies share things such as the achievement of company goals of the behind the scene of an event. It’s why it’s key to always have ideas as to which type of Facebook post you could make about what’s going inside your company.
One word of advice: make sure the content is still exciting. Showing what’s happening behind the scenes of your company with your employees working might not be really exciting for people to see but showing your team at an industry event is a different story.
#6 – Leverage paid Facebook ads
The best way to get more Facebook reach is to spend your money on Facebook ads. Facebook has one of the most precise targeting options you’ll find online. This means if you crafted a really awesome Facebook post, you could choose to who you want to show it and how many people see your post.
We’ve written tons of articles on Facebook ads, so we recommend you take a look at our blog if this interests you.
Finally, for those who don’t know, here’s how Facebook ads appear normally in your Facebook news feed:
From the Facebook ads manager, you can launch multiple ad formats such as videos, carousels, collection, stories and even Instagram ads!
#7 – Create better images & videos
Quality is king. Arguably, posting low-quality content is dangerous. Why? Well, it could diminish your score in Facebook’s eye meaning that fewer and fewer people would see your posts and secondly you could tarnish your brand’s image.
It’s why we often recommend talking to social media experts if your Facebook reach isn’t quite where you want it to be because taking actions could have a negative impact on your company. If you aren’t sure if your Facebook reach is good or not, we recommend taking a look at the Barometer from Agorapulse.
#8 – Paid reach methods
A type of paid reach which you can control and direct as you fit is the one that businesses get through third party social media platforms. Mainly used for when you want to boost a particular post. For instance, you want your sponsored or non-sponsored Instagram Story to go viral.
You buy Instagram followers, likes or views (or a mix package) from a third party platform like Twicsy.com in order to get an immediate boost but that remains a very sketchy and risky method. If you care about your long term follower growth, don’t even think about getting non-drop real followers.
How can I export my Facebook page data?
It’s quite simple. First, you need to head over to your Facebook page and click on insights.
Once you arrive on the insight section of your page you should see a button called export data. Exporting your data is a good way to analyze in a deeper, more meaningful way.
After this, you’ll be able to select amongst these options: page data, post data or video data. You’ll also need to choose the file format, the timeframe and the date range.
We usually keep the layout, file format and change the date range according to what we want. It’s also interesting to download all three options of data types.
Here you go, you’ve got your Facebook page data in a format that you can analyze and play with more easily. You’ll see the different time increments there and be able to better know if your marketing efforts are actually yielding results.
What’s the difference between Facebook reach, impression and engagement?
In simple terms, your reach is the amount of unique people your page has reached. It’s why your Facebook reach will always be smaller than your impressions because an impression counts when someone saw your content twice, not unique. Your Facebook page engagement is when people interacted with your page hence why the number should be even smaller.
For instance, you could have 100,000 impressions, 25,000 in reach and 1,500 engagements. It would mean that 25,000 people saw your content a total of 100,000 impressions, which is on average 4 times. Out of those 25,000 individuals, 1,500 decided to interact with your content through likes, comments and shares.
Let’s reach new heights
Your Facebook reach is quite important to understand. It’s a metric that affects all other metrics. It might not be a bottom of the funnel metric but it’s a good metric to build awareness.
You can, for instance, decide to not measure your Facebook ad performance until you’ve reached a minimum amount of people. This way you’ll find conclusions that make sense to you and your brand.
I hope that the six different ways to increase your organic page reach. I recommend you test some or all of them if possible.
One last thing, never forget that metrics matter but connections matter more. You could have a large following and audience but zero interactions because you haven’t connected with your audience.
Although reach is an important metric that does have an impact on your business, you should also look at the comments or messages people send you when they interact with you.
Are people talking about your business positively? Are they commenting on your posts? If you have a gigantic audience & good reach with no interactions, something is definitely wrong.