This post by Mari Smith originally appeared on her site on 7/18/14.
The problem with Facebook organic reach can be summed up in one single graphic: Only 6 percent of your fans are seeing your content in their news feed. The other 94 percent are not.
Some sources indicate that organic reach may drop to 1-2 percent in the near future. Others say it’s destined to hit zero; it’s only a matter of time.
These stats are a big drop from the already low 16 percent that Facebook indicated back in April 2012.
What is causing the decline in organic reach?
The simplest answer is there is a significantly greater amount of potential content flooding into our news feeds on a daily basis. This bigger firehose of content is caused by several factors, including:
– The average number of Facebook friends users have is 338 (that’s a big increase compared to 130 back in 2008).
– 15 percent of Facebook users have more than 500 friends.
– There are between 1500 and 15,000 pieces of content that Facebook could potentially show in your news feed each time you log on to the site!
– The Facebook news feed ranking algorithm (some folks call this formula ‘EdgeRank’) uses more than 100,000 weights* to determine what you’ll see.
– Ultimately, out of the 1,500 – 15,000 potential stories, Facebook passes them through the mega algorithm and displays approximately 300 stories in your feed.
*Examples of weights: how many mutual friends like the person/page/content, how often you interact with the person/page, when the post was published, when the last comment was made, what types of content you typically interact with: watch more videos and Facebook will show you more videos, like more links and Facebook will show you more links.