As an administrator of a Facebook business page, if you’ve taken notice of your page posts reach in the past couple of weeks, I’m sure you’ve noticed a decrease in the number of people who see your posts – known in Facebook language as “Reach”?
A few weeks ago, Facebook issued an official statement that declared they would now be focusing on showing page posts in your newsfeed that you “want to see”.
We’ve always known that for every 100 people who like your Facebook page, only around 16 of those were seeing your posts. So bearing thist in mind, their latest announcement has brought about another tweak. Of those 16 people who were seeing your posts, they will only continue to them if they are interested in seeing them.
And as they don’t call every user up and ask them what they want to see, they have to make assumptions. These assumptions are the basis for their algorithm – commonly referred to as Edgerank.
So if you regularly like, comment and share posts from a page, Facebook assume you are interested in that page’s content – and will show you more of their posts in your newsfeed.
The key word here is “regularly” – so those viral posts you see that claim “Facebook are out to get us, please like this post if you want to see more of my posts” don’t make any difference – you have to regularly interact.
Which means that as a page administrator, you have to regularly post interesting and engaging content.
But then last week, it all changed again……!
Now they’ve announced that certain types of posts will achieve a greater reach than others…
One click to getting more reach on Facebook… now.
Live posting vs scheduled posts vs 3rd party apps posts
#1: Your post will achieve the best reach if it is posted live. That means no scheduling, you just go to Facebook, write your post and hit submit.
#2: Your posts will achieve the 2nd best reach if you schedule them to go live later, using the Facebook scheduling 
tool (the little clock icon in the bottom left hand corner of the box where you write your posts – see image)
#3: Your posts will achieve the least reach if you schedule them to go live later using a 3rd party application (such as Hootsuite), or they have been syndicated from another app (such as automating tweets to automatically post in Facebook – which I really hope you aren’t doing – see this post for why!)
You and I are busy business owners… we know it is not practical to add every Facebook post live… but to work with this rule, I recommend you do try and post live at least a couple of times per week – more if you can find time to do so. But keep up the scheduling of posts that you do now.
After all, scheduling something is better than posting nothing at all live.
But that isn’t the whole story I’m afraid… there’s more – yet another change. But I don’t want to overwhelm you, so I’m going to write a 2nd post that details how you can achieve a greater reach through different types of posts.
You can read the 2nd post here; https://veronicapullen-co-uk.stackstaging.com2014/02/getting-more-reach-on-facebook-part-two/
If you’ve found this blog useful, please do like and share using the buttons below. If you have any questions or comments, leave me a comment below
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Hi Richard, thanks for commenting
The approx 16/100 page reach is organic – that is, that 16(ish) of your own fans see the post in their newsfeed. However, if one of those fans then interacts with the post (by liking, commenting, sharing etc) their action creates a “story” in the newsfeed of their friends too. You’ve probably seen “person a liked page a’s post” in your newsfeed? That’s what Facebook calls a story
There is nothing absolute about any of these projections, and as I said in part two, the only absolute stats are those that relate specifically to your page. So if your stats show that text posts get a better reach, then I would encourage you to stick with what you’re doing. Albeit with the caveat that you should split test regularly to take into account the regular changes to Facebook’s algorithm
What works best one week, may not work best the week after. It’s Facebook’s way of keeping us entertained 🙂
Hi Veronica
Thanks for the interesting and useful information
I find, however, that like lots of people, some of the information Facebook provides about Reach and Engagement is less than clear in what it actually means eg what does it mean when Facebook tells you 118 people have seen your post?
Also if using the statistics you provided about only 16 people for every 100 people like your page actually see your post where as the example above do the other 102 people come from given that only 72 people like my page
Based on my posts from this year I have found that the posts comprising text and images about my work have been seen by far more people than the other posts about other artists or gallery events etc.
I would welcome your comments on the points I have made
Kind regards
Richard