Facebook Likes High, Reach Horrible

4 replies
Hi everyone,

I've been working as a social media manager for a few years, worked for a big social media agency and everything...now I'm back to freelancing. I know my expertise are no where near those of the warriors in here, so I'm asking for help!!

So I have a client who has a pretty decent amount of likes...approx 35k. The average reach I get on a post is 1k views, 1 or 2 likes, 1 or 2 comments. Nothing. I have tried testing so many different things, like making sure to leave out any words that mention a specific city, not using links, hashes, no hashes, varying the post types, monitoring the most active times, etc. Everything. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to reach more people. I had ONE post that managed to reach 14k people the other day with 70 shares and 40 comments. It was a really shareable infographic...but still. I post funny memes relevant to the audience that would normally get the same kind of reaction as the infographic. All of the content is relevant.

It's a travel site. The audience is worldwide, the majority is in the US, west coast. But in order to drive traffic back to the site itself, I post 1, 2 or sometimes 3 pieces of site content a day (all totally different types of content...a blog post, a forum discussion, and a review for example, and all different post types as well...I always switch it up), and then some engagement stuff as well.

Our "sort of" competitors have around 300k likes and average shares in the hundreds. I know they have a lot more likes than we do....but my client swears that we should be getting way more reach and doesn't understand why we are only getting seen by 1k people if we have 30k likes.

So first I thought it was maybe our likers werent following us and so we werent showing up in their news feed. But when I went to investigate I saw that when you like a page, you automatically follow it (is this somewhat new? I thought in the past you had to manually select this option.)

The highest performing content is text only posts, with links and also just engagement questions. But it's still not a lot. The only other thing I could think of was that the page was really crappily managed before me...it was started in 2009 and I just started working on it in December. My clients are pressuring me every day to get more engagement and drive more traffic to their site....but I am stumped as to why nothing is working. Twitter is doing great...but fb I have no idea what is going on.

Is anyone else having this issue with extremely low reach? I think fb is penalizing the page for being crappy for so long, and it sees that we have somewhat of a decent amount of likes, so we must have $$ to spend on boosting posts, so its trying to force us into that direction (sounds crazy I know). I just want to show up in more feeds. And I know my content isnt horrible, and that it's shareable and that I'm doing things and voicing things in a way to engage with the viewers. Ive worked on many big client accounts before and never had this kind of issue before. My content was always performing pretty well. Right now my client is discussing doing some kind of paid post to tell everyone to turn on notifications for the page...but I told them that would risk people unliking the page altogether when they got annoyed with it.

Bottom line is I will lose this client soon if I don't change something quickly. Any suggestions or thoughts? Similar stories?
#facebook #high #horrible #likes #low #reach
  • Profile picture of the author MarinerdMike
    Tough one. No matter what anyone is saying these days, engagement is much more difficult than it was a few months ago.

    Personally, I see a LOT more newsfeed ads in my timeline (which I keep relatively low key - friends & family for the most part) these days so I'm thinking that FB has simply decided to become more of an advertising platform that it used to be.

    I'm no guru, but my strategy going forward is going to include allocating a small budget to boost or promote certain posts - I'm talking like $2 to $5 for posts that I feel really need to be seen - just to increase engagement. I believe that if you can boost engagement regularly through paying, your "free" posts will perform better. It's a theory, but I'm going to test it out.

    I'm also going to go much harder on converting the likes to leads and focus on building a list.

    Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author koreancowboy
    Yeah, FB changed its algo to reduce the number of posts from Pages. Now everyone needs to boost posts (which I prefer anyways) in order to reach your targeted audience.
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    • Profile picture of the author sealab2021
      Thanks guys...yea...I'm willing to bet our competitors are boosting posts pretty frequently. And I know FB is trying to steer more businesses in the direction of paying more...but I didn't think it would be sooo badly effecting the reach on a page like this one. It's crazy.
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  • Profile picture of the author sealab2021
    Also, is it worth doing a boosted post to ask people to make sure they are following us? Or can I assume that everyone is indeed following us now? I have no way to chck how many people are actually following us..and just because people are auto following when they like the page now, does that mean all the old likes who didnt follow us are now following us?
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