Facebook: The engagement is over

Facebook, and why your posts aren’t being seen much anymore…

If you’re posting on Facebook these days you’re likely getting a much lower response than in the past. There were the golden days of Facebook, say 4-8 years ago, when the followers just kept stacking up and the engagement was high. Now it’s much more difficult to find new followers, let alone real engagement.

And if you’re running your business either mostly or solely through Facebook, you’ve had to make some radical changes, right?!

In the past year, the numbers for many individual pages and business pages has dropped off a cliff. Facebook simply isn’t the magic blue pill it used to be.

It all goes back to the Facebook algorithm change that came into force at the start of 2018. It was intended to show users more of what they wanted and less of what they don’t. The other aim was to keep Facebook users scrolling for longer. The unstated aim, or result of the changes, was to push you into boosting posts to reach the same audience.

According to Forbes.com, here are the key take-aways from the Great Facebook Newsfeed Algorithm Change of 2018. The platform now wants to see…

The big changes also affected the way Facebook measures ‘reach’. Each time you log in your newsfeed loads around 250 posts. Pre 2018, ALL of those 250 posts were counted as reach, even if the viewer never scrolled past the posts. Now, reach is registered only if the person scrolls through and SEES the post (which is fairer).

So comparing reach pre-2018 to reach NOW is of little value because the two products are entirely different… as if you needed us to tell you.

Another sobering stat is that only 2% of your followers will ever see your post. So if you have 2,000 followers only 40 people will see it on their timeline. 200,000 followers? Around 4,000 people might see your post. Of course there are variations on the level of your engaged viewers – some more, some less.

This is native posting before boosting. So, surprise surprise, Facebook wants you to boost your posts if you want any meaningful reach these days. If you’re a business and NOT paying for boosting you’re pretty much whistling in a hurricane. Yes, posting on your page is free but is it worth your time reaching out to only 2% of your followers?

Both Google and Facebook are a closed system. Clever people and ‘experts’ try and hack the system, finding ways around the algorithms and ‘bots’ that determine what happens to your post. Just when you think you’ve had a ‘win’, and think you’ve beaten the system, you do precisely the same thing the next time and the post tanks.

It’s a constant game to keep track of the algorithms, indeed it’s a full time job if you’re a business.

But the more you post, the more you read, the more experience you have, the better your results will be, no doubt.

So, amongst the algorithms that power the world’s largest information portals, there is a lot to learn to get the best out of them and be assured that if you’re not paying-to-play you’re not reaching many people at all.

Here are the world’s Top 10 websites in the world as of January this year…

1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Facebook
4. Yahoo
5. Baidu (China)
6. Wikipedia
7. Tencent QQ (China)
8. Amazon
9. Taobao (China)
10. Twitter

In our next article about Facebook 2019 we’ll provide some sure-fire ways you can get better engagement and results from your Facebook page.