Why your Facebook page’s organic reach is plummeting

As mentioned before, from Jan 2015, Facebook will start penalizing business pages for posting certain types of promotional content. As a manager of two brand pages, I’ve also noticed something else. As the weeks and months pass by, organic reach seems to be declining steadily.
‘Organic reach’ refers to how many people you can reach for free on Facebook, by posting to your page. It’s not just me experiencing this – I’m reading similar concerns on several comments sections of blogs, sites, and on social media platforms too. According to Facebook, there are two main reasons for this downward spiral:
1. The growing quantity of information 

“More and more content is being created and shared every day.” The amount of online data is overwhelming and keeps rising, and a lot of this is being posted to Facebook. Plus, this just keeps increasing as technology develops and speeds up.

On average, each time someone visits their Facebook account, there are 1,500 stories that could be available on their news feed. And that number multiplies as their number of friends and page likes increases. Obviously, there is no way one person can consume every single piece of content that’s presented to them when they log on.
So this means there is too much competition for content attention – from both personal connections and businesses. Therefore, your posts’ exposure decreases.
2. The way Facebook’s news feed works 
FB’s news feed is frequently tweaked and updated (and criticized!), which affects post reach too. The system has been designed to show a user content that’s the most relevant to them.
The social network determines relevancy to a specific user through thousands of factors, such as: post type, spam reports/hide posts, popularity of the post and page, etc.
Facebook states that it aims to show less spam and more high-quality content, which results in better engagement.
– – –
So what can you do? 

• Don’t post content that’s spammy or ‘ad-like’ – e.g. one that pushes people to buy your product.
• Provide useful info in the form of blog posts, ebooks, and guides.
• Shape your posts so that they correspond to specific business goals – such as increasing app downloads.
• Offer entertaining or insightful content (relevant to the business of course).

Your goal should also be to minimize the amount of times people unfollow or unlike your page, as this can decrease your reach too. One way to do this is by avoiding too many posts in one day, or multiple posts in quick succession.
It makes sense that if a fan sees content from one page dominating their newsfeed, they’ll click on ‘hide’ or ‘unfollow’, because they’ll want updates from friends & family and other pages. (I do this all the time!)
So in the next post, we’ll give you some specific posting tips to help you maximize your Facebook page’s organic reach.