Losing Post Reach? Is Facebook Still Worth the Effort?

If you’re one of the millions of page owners suffering from a less than satisfactory post reach on your fan page, you might be wondering whether Facebook is still worth the effort.

After spending countless hours, money & effort building your following on the social network, it seems none of that matters anymore, for if you want to reach any of your fans you’re going to have to pay.

Even if a page has 10,000 fans a typical post might only reach 200, or less! And it seems the trend is getting worse.

Why is Facebook limiting post reach?

Facebook has been very forward about their reasons for limiting post reach. As unpaid posts don’t generate the revenue they or their shareholders expect, page owners must pay to reach their fans.

Related Article: How to Most Effectively Market Your Business on Facebook

Just a few months back Facebook made even more changes to the way they organize your news feed. This time posts by friends got priority over posts from pages. Again the post reach for business owners dropped even further

So is Facebook still worth the effort?

For big name brands it has become another cost to absorb, but for everyone else it poses a more serious problem. You might have already paid to build up your fan base, but to reach them you’re going to have to pay even more. So is Facebook really worth it anymore?

This really depends on how much value you put in your Facebook page & how you want to “play the game.”

If you want to reach active, targeted people, few solutions are as effective as Facebook. Not only can you target your ads by age, location, likes, hobbies & profession but you can analyze your marketing efforts & keep full control of your budget.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many fans you have, or how much effort you put into your posts; if you aren’t prepared to put some money on the table you aren’t going to get very far.

On the other hand if you can learn how to play Facebook’s game you can make it worth your while. Convert with content has a useful guide for increasing your Facebook reach without paying for advertising.

Like increasing your rankings on Google, increasing your visibility on Facebook requires optimization of your posts to appear higher in the news feed.  This can be achieved by getting more likes, comments & shares of your content in a short space of time.

• If you put a post-up right now & nothing happens for a few hours, Facebook will bury your post down the news feed.
• If your post looks active & popular, Facebook will continue to show it to more of your fans, thus increasing your post reach.

For pages with a low number of fans, this can almost be impossible to achieve without building your following first. Even a page with several thousand followers might struggle to achieve any “organic reach” in this way.

If you’re not ready to give up Facebook yet, but don’t want to spend the money on FB ads, your best defense is to learn how to create posts that Facebook likes.

What is your experience with Facebook? Is Facebook still worth your effort?

Have you spent less time marketing on the social network since your post reach has dropped? Or have you found ways of combatting it?