Are you feeling confused and frustrated with your Facebook business page? When you post to your free Facebook page, also known as a Fan page, how many of your followers actually see it in their news feed? This post will show you why your Facebook page is still relevant, and why it's important to use it to increase leads and sales. 

If you don't have a page, you can download our free guide that will walk you through the easy steps you can use to create one. 

The biggest challenge for owners of Facebook business pages is low reach.  How many visitors and followers engage with your posts? Probably not that many, right? If 3% of your followers even see your posts, you're doing well. 

The reality is that the way we use the typical Facebook page has to change. And because there is limited organic reach for business pages, you can no longer just post content. You have to be creative to reach and build an audience.

At the same time, Facebook is one of the largest social media sites on the planet. With roughly 2.8 billion monthly active users as of the fourth quarter of 2020, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide.

If you're not using your page to grow your audience, you're leaving money on the table.

Using the old method of gaining followers (fans and likes) and posting on a regular basis, will get you nowhere fast.

Because the number of people who actually see your posts (Facebook reach) has declined over the years, many businesses feel that their Facebook business pages are dead.

In this post, I will show you how you can optimize your Facebook page and share some interesting facts.

At the end you will understand how you can improve your reach, and why you should still view this as a viable platform to grow your business.

So, while it may look at first glance, that your page is dead, you may be surprised to see why we think it's worth your time.

Steps You Can Take Today

I've created a free video and PDF guide that has  specific steps you can take today to create a page if you don't have one. There is another guide that walks you through optimizing your Facebook business page to build more engagement with your audience.

Giving your visitors something of value to do when they land on your page will convert more visitors into leads.

Leads are people who have opted in to hear more about your business.  They are people who are more likely to purchase your products and services.

Once you've followed up with them, they will know more about how your product or service can help them, increasing the opportunity to build a relationship that will result in a purchase. They may even tell their friends and family about your business.

Let's Dig In...

Facebook is the biggest of all the social networks by far, based on just about every measure. However a few years back, they rolled out features that literally destroyed the reach of Facebook business pages.  

Because of those changes, it would be easy to think that your Facebook page has suffered an untimely death.  And with reach around 6% of your total fans (even less on some occasions), that assumption would be right.

These Stats Don't Lie

Regardless of the challenges mentioned above, based on current statistics alone (that were updated for 2021) it's clear that Facebook is still a giant that should not be underestimated.

These stats tell us a lot about this enormous platform. Take a look at the information below:

These stats came from Hootsuite, and they're important for marketers:

• 18.3% of U.S. adults made a purchase through Facebook in the last year

Compare that to 11.1% for Instagram and 2.9% for Pinterest.

•  48.5% of B2B decision makers use Facebook for research

This is why its important to build your brand on this platform providing educational and informative posts about your business. If your target audience is in the B2B market, this is critical. 

• Facebook has an advertising audience of 2.14 billion

That’s the number of people Facebook reports can be reached with ads on its platform. It’s an increase of 2.2% (or 45 million users) since Q3 2020.

• An average Facebook user clicks on 12 ads per month

That’s one every 2.5 days. It may not seem like a huge number, but remember that not all ads require a click to be effective.

Most importantly, this Facebook stat shows that users continue to pay attention to and engage with Facebook ads, rather than tuning them out.

Women click on more ads (15 per month) than men do (10).

• The average Facebook Page shares 1.55 posts per day

Of those posts, 55.6% are photos, 22.2% are videos, 18.5% are links, and just 3.6% are straight status updates.

• Pages with fewer than 10,000 fans see 0.52% engagement

That’s because engagement declines as a Page’s audience grows.

• Facebook Live viewership increased by 50% this spring

This is a big jump! Facebook attributes it to people wanting to attend live events like fitness classes, or connect with people they can no longer support in person, like their favorite artists.

The week of the Easter and Passover holidays was the most popular week ever for Facebook Lives from spiritual Pages.

And it's something that every marketer should take note of. Streaming a Facebook Live broadcast is one of best ways to receive engagement on this huge platform. 

And it's been shown that the best place to stream is on your Facebook page over your personal profile or Facebook Groups! 

On another related note, these are examples of businesses that made the quick decision to transition from in person activities to online activities, due to the pandemic.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that the ability to adapt and thrive in the middle of challenges is critical if you want to survive in business. The same thing applies to Facebook. 

Businesses that were able to leverage an online presence were able to fare better in many cases during the pandemic. 

Part of the transition to our "new normal" in 2020 has included becoming an pro with new tools like Facebook Live.  I imagine that this trend will continue even after the pandemic is over. 

• More than 1.25 billion people visit Facebook Watch every month

If your Page has more than 5,000 followers, try creating content for this video-specific tab within Facebook. 

If your Page has fewer than 5K followers, getting to this number is an important goal for your page. 

The Most Important Metrics

Post reach and Page reach are probably the most important reach metrics available in your Page Insights.

Your post reach and your page reach includes the number of people who saw any posts from your page during a specific period of time (daily, weekly or monthly).

• Post reach - is the number of people who saw a particular post in their news feed from your page.
• Page reach - is the number of people who saw any posts from your page during a specific period of time (daily, weekly or monthly)

The most two categories of reach are organic reach and paid reach. :

• Organic reach - is the reach given by Facebook for free. It’s when your fans see your posts in their news feeds. They can see your posts in their news feed but also by going on your page and looking for your latest posts.
• Viral reach - A subset of organic reach, this includes people who see your posts because somebody else shared it.
• Non viral reach - Another subset of organic reach, represents the people who saw your posts directly from the posts you’ve made.
  
  Those are generally people who are already following your page and see your post either in their news feed or by going directly on your Facebook page.
• Paid reach - is essentially the reach of individual posts that you paid Facebook to promote. Since you pay to promote them, you can have access to a lot of data and reports such as demographics data, engagement rates, etc. With paid reach, you should get unlimited reach (unless you’ve reached 1.6B people).

The Factors to Consider When Posting to Your Page

Here are a few factors that affect the reach on your Facebook Page. This is by no means an all inclusive list of factors:

Factor #1 – If followers have interacted with your page.  If they haven't interacted on your page in a while, it will reduce your reach. 

A great way to keep your followers engaged with your page is to get them on your email list. Check out the video above to see how to add a sign up form to your page to make it easy for people to sign up right on Facebook.

Through your email list, you can remind followers when you have new content. You can invite them to take a look, to like, comment and share your posts when you have new content on your blog, YouTube channel, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. 

Factor #2 – The type of posts your followers interact with the most.  There are three types of posts... videos, photos or links.

Of the three post types, links receive the lowest reach. Users interact with videos the most, with photos coming in second.

The takeaway from this is: post more videos!  

Factor #3 – Initial interaction pool

When you create a post on your Facebook page, Facebook shows it to a small group of people (in the range of 25 to 100) and these people will determine the fate of your Facebook reach.

If they interact with it, you will get a higher score in Facebook’s algorithm and your post will reach more and more people.

If they don't interact with it, your post will be stuck in cricket land. 

Factor #4 – Keeping a high positivity score

It matters what people think about your posts.

It's up to you to decide how controversial your brand will be, but keep in mind that the biggest reason for your Facebook page is branding.

Everything you post represents your brand. For instance, if you post something provocative and you get tons of people who indicate that they don’t want to see your post. This will negatively affect your Facebook reach.

It's important to keep in mind that users can decide to ask Facebook to not show your posts on your Facebook news feed anymore.

Factor #5 – Time decay

This means that as your post ages, the reach will decrease.

The Take Away

If you're struggling for things to post on your Facebook business page, check here for tips.  When you post, use the tips above for more engagement and reach.

For the most part, the free, organic reach that page owners used to enjoy is gone. With a few clever tricks you may be able to recover some or all of it.  

Yes, Facebook has crushed organic reach and it has become a pay to play environment. 

However when we look at the big picture, we used to be limited to bowing to the Google gods and SEO in order to do anything online.

Facebook Pages give us another option besides Adwords and SEO.  It takes time to rank with SEO, lots of time in some cases. 

If done well, it takes a much shorter time to build an engaged audience on Facebook. The audience can be targeted and narrowed, even more than the targeting you can do on Google Adwords. 

Today's Facebook may cost more to get results, but it enables Page owners to move quickly to build an audience that they can grow and nurture, selling more products and services. 

Yes, it may look like your Facebook Page is dead today. But we will look at ways to improve reach, and connect with followers. You'll learn to use Facebook, in addition to all your other tools, to convert those followers to an audience you can convert into paying customers.