There are fundamentally two ways to reach an audience — organic and paid. On Facebook,
organic reach is the number, or the proportion of people a marketer can reach for free by posting to the company’s Page. And
paid reach is what the marketer pays for.
When marketers post messages on their Page, only a fraction of those messages reach their followers, and that
fraction is getting smaller. According to various studies, Facebook’s organic reach plunged to as low as 2% in 2016 and it
continues to decline.
The reasons for the decline were outlined by Brian Boland, Facebook’s VP of Advertising Technology, in June 2014.
He said that more and more content was being created and shared every day, and that for the average person, there were 1,500
stories that could appear their news feed each time they logged onto Facebook. So rather than show all possible content, Facebook’s
news feed shows each person the content that is most relevant.
What is “most relevant” is determined by the logic of Facebook’s machine learning algorithm that decides what gets
filtered. Naturally, marketers are keen to get a sense of the logic that controls the algorithm so that they can craft content that
has greater likelihood of reaching their followers.
Ranking algorithms in general are a form of personalization that benefit both users
and marketers. Users get to see what interests them most and marketers get their posts across to
those users who are most engaged and interested in their brands.
This is vital for social networks. If they do not effectively sort their content users
will get less interesting and less relevant information which will dilute their experience on the
platform, and eventually they might leave. And marketers who seek a return on their investments,
would walk away if their efforts are not directed at their target audience.
