If your business is invested in organic Facebook & Instagram posting, then it’s time to abort the mission, STAT.
We get a lot of questions regarding organic social media strategy (particularly Facebook & Instagram), and we’ve given the same responses for the last few years. The biggest concern we’ve had with Facebook & Instagram is that they have been a pay-to-play situation for a long time now. Which essentially means that you’re not really going to see much benefit unless you’re paying for advertising, and your organic strategy is now ‘up-keep’, rather than a business tool.
What is organic social media?
Organic social media is your everyday social media posts. These are the free posts that users and businesses make everyday on their social media accounts. Organic social media posts are not your boosted posts or paid advertisements.
Why is organic social media for business dead?
Organic social media for business is dead because of one major metric: reach. Reach refers to the number of users who see each/any of your company’s organic social posts. Currently, the reach percentage for a business account on Facebook & Instagram is around 5.2%. What this means, is that if your company’s Facebook page has 100 followers and you make a post, only 5 of those 100 will even see the post. Your entire following will not see your posts. If only 5% of your audience is seeing your post, then you’re missing out on 95% of the people who have already followed you. This is not by chance, these companies are purposefully limiting organic reach if you are a business account. Sounds ridiculous, right? It is.
Read HootSuite’s Article Here.
Why would Facebook or Instagram limit your reach as a business account?
Facebook & Instagram are in the business for profit. They are aware that if businesses can drastically gain business from organic posts, then they won’t pay for their advertising platform. META’s stock price is currently $188/share, which is primarily a result of advertising revenue. Without advertising revenue, META would not survive. In order to ‘push’ companies to use their advertising platform, they will drastically limit how many people can see your posts, until you pay for advertising to gain that reach back. It is a pay-to-play game.
Do they limit the reach on all accounts?
No. Facebook & Instagram want regular users (non-commercial) to be seen frequently, so they can get likes, and remain active on the platform. As soon as you change your account to a “business”, your reach will drop drastically. Facebook & Instagram does not want to limit non-commercial users to keep them on the platform. The more non-commercial users there are, the better the advertising platform will be for businesses.\
What can you do to increase your reach as a business account?
The answer is to pay for ads and boosted posts. With advertising, you can increase your reach exponentially and target customers more effectively. However, organic posting’s effectivity is basically zero.
Other avenues to explore
A very popular honorable mention of avenues to explore are TikTok & Twitter. These platforms do not limit your reach in this regard, and TikTok even increases reach way further beyond your current following with organic posts. These two platforms are highly recommended for increasing organic reach on a social platform. However, TikTok is limited to videos, and Twitter is primarily a text-based platform, which means you will need to adjust your content to fit into these social media platforms.
Should we just ditch Facebook & Instagram altogether if we don’t want to pay for ads?
The short and long answers are both no. We would highly recommend having profiles and organic posts on Facebook & Instagram, but we would advise people not to put as much time and effort into the planning and execution of organic posting on these platforms. Because only 5% of your following will even see your posts, it is not worth the time and effort to dig too deep into creating these posts. Organic posts on these platforms should be thought of as “upkeep”, and not a strategy to bring in more leads, sales, or customers.
If you want to bring in more leads, sales, and customers then you should really think about paying for advertising, because organic social is dead.
