Have you seen your Facebook reach plummet in the last year or so? If so, you’re not alone. It’s been a downhill trend and frustration has been boiling over for social media marketers. What’s the solution? Test! Test! Test! As marketers, ...
Remington Begg
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3 min read
Have you seen your Facebook reach plummet in the last year or so? If so, you’re not alone. It’s been a downhill trend and frustration has been boiling over for social media marketers. What’s the solution? Test! Test! Test! As marketers, it’s our job to always be looking for ways to get our messages seen by more and more people.
We are always experimenting and believe we have found a possible solution to low organic reach for Facebook posts. We’ve found that videos uploaded directly to Facebook have had the best organic reach out of all the different post types. There are a few possible explanations for why video is reaching so many more people.
Reasons behind video reach
In the past, photo posts dominated organic reach. Marketers caught on, and now Facebook has throttled back photo reach from business pages. It’s understandable if you look at it from Facebook’s point-of-view. Facebook can’t populate people’s new feed with an overwhelming amount of content from businesses, that would scare people away. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family, not to be bombarded with interruptive marketing messages. With videos being a newer type of media, they don’t dominate people’s newsfeed. So Facebook gives this lesser used post type more reach.
Another reason Facebook might be giving video more reach is because they see video as the media type of the future. Facebook has made several investments in video and has been developing applications like RIFF to further champion the use and adoption of video.
Research says
In our own research, we have found that Facebook video posts have seen close to 90% more organic reach than link posts and 40% more reach than photo posts. More confirmation comes from Social Breakers; they’ve found that turning to video—instead of photos—offered substantially more organic reach as well. Their results show a 135% increase on average when posting a video instead of a photo.
How long will the reach last?
If video posts are going to follow the same path as past photo posts, then this little pocket of organic Facebook reach isn’t going to last forever. One of two things could happen; first, more and more brands take notice of the value of video and the increased usage will dilute the effectiveness. The second stumbling block would be if Facebook changes its news feed algorithm to make video posts stand on equal ground as the other post types when it comes to organic reach.Either way, marketers should take advantage of the opportunity now and start testing experimenting with native Facebook videos. For additional on how you can improve your social media marketing, download this free Social Media Marketing for Business ebook.
