Fewer Eyeballs Are Seeing Your Facebook Posts: How Agents Can Uncover Their True Reach

If you feel like less and less of your friends are seeing and engaging with your Facebook business page's posts, you're not alone. Marketing gurus call this your "reach" and numerous studies show that it really is quickly declining. (You're not imagining it!)

In fact, a recent study by Buzzsumo suggests that the average number of engagements with posts created by Facebook business pages has fallen more than 20 percent since January 2017 alone.

So, whatcha gonna do about it? How are you going to maximize the number of eyeballs that will see (and engage with) your Facebook content?

In order to understand the solution, let's understand the problem and why it's happening.

Organic Reach vs. Paid Reach

The first thing to understand is the difference between organic reach and paid reach.

Generally speaking, organic reach is the number of people who see your content without paid distribution, whereas paid reach is the number of people who see your content thanks to you opening your wallet for paid promotion.

This is an important distinction. In upcoming blog posts, we're going to look at ways to specifically improve your organic reach—without spending money on paid promotion.

Why is Facebook organic reach declining?

There are a couple different reasons why most marketers believe Facebook organic reach is declining:

1. There's an explosion of content — More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared each month on Facebook. When we post content from our business pages, we're literally fighting for space in our audience's news feed.
2. Algorithms are smart — Facebook is constantly changing their algorithms (the formula that determines who sees what). In order to have the most relevant content show up in a user's feed, Facebook tailors the content to the audience.

Why should agents care about organic reach?

Between 2012 and 2014 (when Facebook reach really started to take a tumble), organic reach for the average Facebook page dropped from 16 percent to roughly 6.5 percent. (Some other studies suggest it can be as low as 2 percent.)

That means a real estate page with 1,000 fans could expect just 65 of them (on a good day) to actually see the page's post in their news feeds.

Of course, this means fewer clicks, fewer comments, fewer shares—fewer opportunities to start conversations, to build your brand, and to convert Facebook fans to living, breathing (active) leads.

But, it's not all doom and gloom. There are some relatively easy ways that you can improve your organic reach without spending a dollar. We're going to explore those in more detail throughout this series.

First, let's understand how YOUR reach has been impacted.

How do you measure your reach?

One of the benefits of having a Facebook business PAGE vs. a personal PROFILE is the number of insights, statistics, and analytics you can view via a business page. To really understand your organic reach—and to find ways to improve it—you've got to do a little research.

Step #1: Find the "Insights" for your page

Go to your Facebook business page and hit the tab for "Insights." This is where all the gold lives!

You can adjust your time frame (example: last 7 days vs. last 28 days). You'll also see that Facebook gives you numerous data options: Page Views, Page Likes, Reach, Engagement, Followers, etc.

I encourage you to browse around and get familiar with what's available to you. You can't do any damage here, so grab a coffee and do some digging. Get in there.

Step #2: Uncover your overall reach

If you want to learn how many eyeballs are actually seeing your content, click on the "Reach" tab. Here you can explore a few different options: 1) Post Reach; 2) Recommendations; 3) Likes, Comments and Shares; 4) Hide, Spam and Unlikes; and 5) Total Reach. They also give you a little definition for each.

A great place to start is by looking at "Total Reach" (towards the bottom), which will give you an overview of how many people you're reaching via all of your page's activity. As you work to improve your organic reach using the tactics we'll be discussing, this stat will help you understand if you're actually improving.

Step #3: Look at post-specific metrics

Do a little browsing on the "Post" section. This breaks down your organic reach via the type of post (example: video, sharing a link, etc.) and is super helpful for seeing what TYPE of content your fans are engaging with the most.

Spoiler alert: Live video and video are likely your best performing posts—or can be!

Note that engagement is different than reach. Remember, reach is how many eyeballs see your content and engagement is when those eyeballs decide to DO something like click the link, share the post, etc.

It also shows you the time of day when the bulk of your fans are online. HINT: Play around with your posting times to see how they correlate to your audience being online.

Let's discover the workaround

Over the next few weeks, we'll uncover some of the easiest tactics to increase and improve your organic reach. We'll focus on the organic (free) stuff like video, audience optimization, quality over quantity, and more... but, we'll also give you a few tips for paid tactics like boosting posts if you want to try them out.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! What are some of the things you'd like to learn about Facebook? Share your questions on our Facebook page!

Catch up on the Facebook Reach series here:

This article is part of our series on how to get more attention to your Facebook page. Here are links to the other articles you may have missed:

• Personal PROFILE or Business PAGE: What's the right choice for real estate agents?
• 6 ways to dust off your Facebook account and get back in the game

To view the original article, visit the Realtor.com Results blog.