There has been a lot of commotion around Facebook’s reach metric in the past few weeks. Some page admins have been claiming that they can only reach a fraction of the followers they used to with each post since September 21st. This sudden decrease is supposedly caused by the social network altering the Edgerank algorithm (more on that later) controlling which posts end up in fan’s News feeds, but Facebook hasn’t made it clear if that’s the case.
We think that it’s too early to state whether the reach metric or Edgerank has been altered or not, we are collecting data for a longer time period to conclude whether the downslide is justified. For now, look at the table below to see the average organic and viral reach of your post according to your page size (the data have been gathered from July 1st to September 30th 2012).
The Bigger You Are, The More Challenging It Gets
Naturally, the bigger your Facebook page gets the more people your posts will reach. But the percentage reached will gradually decrease, as it will represent a smaller fraction of your fan base. Yes, the bigger you are, the harder it is to reach and engage a larger percentage of your fans. While a smaller page with less than one thousand Likes reaches on average 33.2% of its fan base with a single post, a bigger page with between 100 and 999 thousand fans reaches "only” 8.2% of them, but of course the actual number of fans reached is larger.
Get Into The News Feed Spotlight
Sounds like a punishment for performing well in social media? Try perceiving it as a challenge. With Facebook reaching 1 billion monthly active users this month, it is clear that the News feeds are crowded with content that wants to be seen and interacted with. So to win your place in the News feed spotlight, your brand has to publish interesting stories, with an emphasis on quality over quantity. Reach has a direct impact on the Engagement Rate of your page. The more fans reached, the more they have the potential to become engaged.
It may also be the case that pages with fewer fans have a more dedicated base, being or felling closer or more intimately connected with a brand. The first Likes of any page are usually the page creators themselves, their friends and families and those that work for or do business with that company or use its services on a very regular basis. The key is to make everyone feel like that: engaged and connected.
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Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
