Facebook Marketing: Organic vs Paid Reach
Facebook is the leading platform in terms of social media marketing share. With more than 2 billion active users, it is a great place to start promoting your business. You can reach a huge audience leveraging various tools available in facebook ads manager.
But, the dynamics of organic reach in facebook is pretty confusing to say the least. Let us look at some of the prominent aspects of organic and paid reach in facebook advertising universe.
First, let us understand the meaning of reach in facebook marketing.
What is facebook reach?
Reach is an estimated metric in facebook. It is actually the number of people who see your facebook ad/post at least once. Reach also differs from impressions.
It is a metric that gives an estimated number of unique users who see your post/ad. Impressions on the other hand may include multiple views by the same users.
Reach in facebook is affected by a number of variables, for example the number of likes/follows on a page and engagement rate in organic reach. Ad budget, bid and the criteria for audience targeting in paid reach.
Organic Reach
Organic reach is all about exposure of your facebook content without any paid advertisements. Over the years marketers have observed that for some reason, organic reach in facebook is steadily decreasing.
There could be a number of factors influencing this decline in organic reach. According to some, the level of engagement in facebook has declined over the years. In other words, the number of shares has significantly decreased. Now, people are less likely to share a post, compared to the earlier days of facebook.
This may sound like a logical analysis, but other marketers truly believe that facebook has deliberately controlled the levels of organic reach. It may be due to the increasing competition in paid advertising.
A massive amount of content is shared on facebook daily, which means there is a lot of competition to get space in news feed. And in terms of balancing this competition, facebook seems to have opted for more ad revenue.
This decrease in organic reach has significantly increased competition in facebook ads universe, resulting in more space for ads and less organic reach.
Paid Reach
Unlike organic reach, you need to spend money on facebook ads for paid reach. The easiest way to get started with facebook ads is to boost a post. Or you can always execute your paid marketing strategy via more advanced features in facebook business manager.
Decline in facebook organic reach has created massive opportunities in paid marketing. Facebook paid services provide the right tools to reach huge audience segments based on location, demographics and interests.
Paid reach in facebook is now just a few easy steps away, it starts with creating your target audience, defining your budget & setting your bid (in case of CPC/CPM campaigns only), you can also check your estimated reach once the budget & audience is configured. But, it must be kept in mind that reach metric in facebook is not an accurate figure.
Potential reach figure before any facebook campaign is just an estimated metric based on previous facebook data.
The actual reach analytics after starting the campaign always depend on audience behavior & interaction, which cannot be controlled by facebook ads system.
But, one can always follow extensive advertisement guides provided by facebook to best optimize campaigns for better results.
Facebook Marketing in 2020
Facebook organic reach in 2020 is totally dependent on paid reach. Only successful paid campaigns can boost organic reach in facebook.
Now, it’s all about paid marketing in facebook. And trying to optimize for maximum reach with minimum cost is the best option.
