The Current Truth Behind Organic Posts For Businesses

If you’re a smaller business or about to start one, I’m sure you’ve already thought about social media as it pertains to your brand. We understand that paid social is expensive and it’s only going to continue getting more expensive, so you may be thinking about organic social until you can budget for those promoted posts. We’re happy to hear you’re pivoting and willing to put in that extra work to try and get in/stay in the game, but we do have some news to share with you. 

If you’ve already started with your organic journey, you may have noticed that organic reach is on a decline; and if you haven’t, then kudos to your brand as social networks deem that your posts are engaging and working well with the algorithm. Organic reach on Facebook went from 16% in 2012 to 2.27% in 2015, and it’s only continuing to drop.

As mentioned above, paid social is the way to get seen, because platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., want to get paid, but it’s not just that. Their algorithms are set to show users things that they find interesting. So how do the social networks determine what’s interesting to users? We’ll tell you! 

In short, social media is forming its own SEO by adopting Google’s algorithm, their goal is to show each user what they want to see. Now since the Google experience can’t exactly be copied, they tailored it to fit their platform. 

Basically, you make a post which gets shown to a small group of your followers/friends and based on the reaction(s) gained it either stays at the bottom of the page or gets pushed up and introduced to more and more people. So if your post gets a lot of attention (reactions, comments, shares) it gets introduced to a new group of your followers/friends or pushed to the top of the page. 

This can be seen as good or bad, on one hand, it could work if all the engagement is positive then others will want to see it. However, if it’s all negative it still gets introduced to more people that will think the same way and dislike it. You could also make an argument that people enjoy correcting/teaching others when they post something they don’t agree with, so perhaps the idea makes sense. 

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with how things are done, now that you have a basic understanding of the algorithm it’s time to change things up! 

If you’re unclear on the next steps, take a look at Increasing Your Organic Reach, and if you’re all set on that take a look at Questions To Help Build Your Next Campaign Strategy.

Vanessa Niragira, Oakville, Ontario, October 2020 

Additional Resources

https://mention.com/en/blog/organic-social-media-reach/  

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