The End Of Organic Reach = The End Of Facebook?

Have you noticed how low your Facebook page’s organic reach is lately? Maybe you’ve tried everything from memes to videos and high-quality content, but nothing will work and you’re this close to tearing your hair out.

Calm down! It’s not your fault! Last month, Facebook revealed in a leaked sales deck sent to partners that, unless you pay for ads, your organic reach is only going to get worse.

From the horse’s mouth: “Your brand can fully benefit from having fans when most of your ads show social context, which increases advertising effectiveness and efficiency. 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. We’re getting to a place where because more people are sharing more things, the best way to get your stuff seen if you’re a business is to pay for it.”

Charming. It’s basically a big two fingers up to all of the social media managers who have worked hard to come up with strategies on how to best use Facebook. Businesses have seen their reach percentage drop to as low as 2%. Needless to say, I’m less than impressed.

While some other social media platforms offer advertising and have been guilty of over-promoting it, decreasing organic reach just to force people to pay for ads is incredibly arrogant, unfair and an abuse of power.

Depending on whether you decide to carry on using Facebook or not, you’ll definitely have to overhaul your marketing plan to accommodate these changes.

But it’s not just the page owners that lose out. A Facebook user likes a business’s page so they can see updates from them and engage with the brand. Now Facebook are saying that unless that brand you like to hear from are prepared to line their pockets by paying for advertising, then tough, you won’t see those updates in your feed.

The revelation has sparked a huge backlash and, given the bad publicity the site has had over the past few months (see: rubbish Graph Search function, failed hashtags attempt and blatant plagiarism) this is the last thing Zuckerberg and Co need.

The problem with Facebook is that there’s only so much you can do. Yes, it’s great that you have over 1,000 likes in a matter of months, but not even 20 of them are going to see your posts unless you pay for it – so what’s the point?

That’s the question many people have been asking about the site, also in regards to the recent announcement that video ads will be spamming our news feeds and, as if to add insult to injury, they’ll be autoplaying too!

This could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back with Facebook, as it drives away users who don’t want the latest video game ad blaring through the office when they go on their news feeds.

Now, if you depended on Facebook for your social media marketing strategy, then this news might leave you feeling a little lost as to where to turn, but fear not! There are plenty of other social networks that will help you as much, if not more, than the money-grabbing Facebook ever did.

The likes of Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter are learning what NOT to do from embarrassing dad Facebook, but it will be interesting to see if they put even more of an emphasis on advertising than they already have and follow in Facebook’s footsteps. But something tells me that the backlash will certainly put them off…

What do you think of Facebook’s latest development? Is it just another selfish money-making scheme, or are they well within their rights because, at the end of the day, they’ve got to make money?