Is your Facebook traffic dropping? You are not alone

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During the first part of 2015, Facebook has started rolling some small and large newsfeed changes. On the one hand, most of these changes benefit users and help them filter, prioritize and consume their newsfeeds, but on the other hand this means more companies, like our venture, investing more money in advertising trying to keep their social traffic near the goal, and to avoid getting lost in the Facebook content limbo.

Facebook's views on organic reach declining

The latest change involves the drop in company page 'likes', which I believe is the right move, since they will remove deactivated and memorialized accounts. In their words, they will discard users whom we cannot expect them to interact with our brand. What worried Page / Community Managers the most was the organic reach drop during the second week of February, and it is not the first time this happens to us .

The truth is there is no algorithm evolution compilation as used to check for SEO purposes, but Facebook has openly stated that they are dropping the organic reach of page posts.

Impact of Algorithms

In addition, the way they are doing it is mostly through algorithms. At one point, they called this ' algorithm EdgeRank' but have moved away from using this term. Along with the usage of the EdgeRank, there was another improvement more related to content that looks too promotional to the end user, a smart way to improve post quality and move ad material to where it belongs, the Facebook Ads platform.

In this way, after the organic reach drop, some companies increased the budget for Facebook and started promoting their posts more often, besides of the regular campaigns trying to keep the reach and engagement around or above the same levels they had on Q4 last year. The result in some cases was a bit discouraging, as they announced the introduction of the Relevance Score for ads on February 11th, a date that in spite of the fact we cannot confirm the date - seems to be the start of the organic reach drop too. In some of our campaigns, it meant a drop in the paid reach too.

Why is Facebook decreasing organic reach?

People have been changing their behaviour during the last years aggressively. Users are browsing the web through smartphones more than they did 3 years ago, which I believe this seems people spending less time during each session and having a smaller screen to consume content. This is the place where quality becomes more important than the quantity of it.

There are some conspiracy theories out there, talking about Facebook dropping organic reach for business pages in a way to increase their revenue. Let us be honest, every major or small change on every single traffic source will affect you, and the only way to overcome the fall is to continue working hard and to do not waste time on trying to find excuses.
Even Google does it, with every algorithm update, many sites might be harmed and some of them will switch to paid search without thinking too much instead of staying crying in the shower blaming on Google. They know that if you convert, there is no major harm in investing a bit more money on the process, as long as you do not burn it.

Facebook is trying to make you more professional and pushing you to give users something meaningful along with your product, because at the end it all relates to the user experience, and having a social network with tons of low quality contents benefit neither you nor Facebook.

What can I do to avoid the Facebook organic decline?

The short answer is to give the user something valuable, something they can use, share or help other people while engaging with your brand. Forget about contests, those are for prize-looking users, not real customers. Keep an eye over Facebook latest acquisitions and changes over all their platforms.

If they are pushing now the usage of videos, why are you not using them on your business page? I am not talking about your YouTube channel, I am talking about short videos uploaded directly to the Facebook platform, and I say short videos because most users will watch it while using a smartphone.

New Google Algorithm Update in April 2015

Are you ready for mobile users? Is your website mobile friendly?

Those questions should be a yes since the last year, and if you have not been thinking about it, well, I have some bad news for you, as Google is pushing a Mobile Friendly algorithm update at the end of April, which they said would use mobile friendliness as a ranking factor.

Something Facebook have been tracking since months ago when they added the bounce rate as part of the algorithm that ranks organic posts. This means that if a user clicks on a link and comes back quickly to the platform, you were doing some link baiting trying to catch more users with low quality content, and guess what, they know it.

Technology is changing fast, the user is pushing it to the edge too, and you need to focus more on them, because at the end of the day the users are the ones who will click, share and like your content and pages giving you the exposure you need. Be friendly and threat them as the possible customers they are. They are not foolish, and as well as they can make your company growth, they can also throw it to the bottom sea too.