On Facebook, 97% of Brands Still Rely On Organic Reach
This research paper was featured in Campaign US magazine.
The past 18 months have seen a fundamental shift in the way social media works for brands. As algorithms continue to shift which social content is fed to users, the lingering model of organic content creation for brands has become inefficient and ineffective. Yet, 97% of brand still employ the organic posting model.
Organic Reach is Dead
Facebook first throttled the number of people a brand’s organic posts reach as early as 2012. The sheer quantity of content being shared as the platform matured meant that, on average, a user could see upwards of 1,500+ pieces of content at any given time. Inevitably, this competition in the newsfeed led to a necessary yet tightly controlled algorithm that filtered the content most relevant to users, instead of showing them it. How the Facebook algorithm works has been investigated and questioned for years, yet one fact remains — brand organic posts aren’t being seen by a statistically significant number of our audience.
For brands, analysis showed that organic reach for all brands continued to fall year over year, from a mean of 16% in 2012 to 6.51% by 2014 (EdgeRank Checker 2014). This decrease meant that content being created was effectively seen by a fraction of the audience many brands spent years accumulating as “fans”.
The Bigger Your Community Gets, The Lower Your Organic Reach
The percentage of organic reach brands can expect to see on Facebook isn’t a one-size-fits-all calculation.
Research has shown that brand pages experience lower reach depending on the size of their community. For big brands (those with 500,000+ likes), organic reach is consistently and harshly lower than those with fewer than 500,000 likes.
A 2015 Locowise report found that pages for big brands (over 1 million likes) had an organic reach of 2.27%, while small brands had an organic reach of 22.8%.
97% of Brands Still Rely on Organic Reach
Despite the extremely limited exposure organic posts receive, 97% of the world’s top 100 brands on Facebook still actively employ the organic posting model. Research done in partnership with Unmetric found that 80% or more of the public content on top branded pages (not including hyper-targeted or dark posts) is posted without paid support, and therefore without gaining the reach necessary to drive marketing objectives.
So, how do we fix it? Stay tuned for our next post.
This article highlights elements of BBDO Comms Planning’s latest report, About Face: A New Approach to Facebook for Big Brands.
To download this white paper, click here.
Saric, Marko. “Facebook Analysis For March Videos And Photos Rule Engagement Totally.” Locowise Blog. 21 Apr. 2015.
Manson, Marshall. “Social@Ogilvy: Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach.” Social@Ogilvy. 5 Mar. 2014.
BBDO & Unmetric Internal Data, August 2016
