Who here has leveraged Facebook 'organic' to grow a 'small business'

You're asking about Organic and unfortunately, those good times ended many many years ago. When Facebook first started, for the first several years facebook would give you organic free traffic when you do things like post an article, share something, etc. But since they have shareholders who need to get paid, what better way than to take away the free organic traffic so people are forced to purchase paid traffic. If they allow people to get tons of free traffic, there's no reason for them to buy ads. And they can justify it since they're still the cheapest paid traffic on the block.

It didn't happen overnight. They take the traffic away slowly. They did the same thing with everything like the Facebook news feed, which used to be one of main traffic sources. You post a news article and then a lot of people see it for free. But if you post a news article now, no one sees it unless you "boost" your content by paying.

Same with Instagram....in the past if you had 10k followers, when you post a picture, all 10k followers saw your post. But after their update a few years back, like 600 people out of 8k followers, see your post unless it's so good it goes viral, then maybe 2k people see it if you're lucky. I don't even see what the point is of having followers now. It used to be super easy to start businesses on IG by just posting relevant pictures consistently.

Your reach is limited with organic post seeing your post reaches ONLY 3-5 % of your audience . Then off-course you can use sponsored post to help boost your reach and targeting . You also have the options of using your profile page to drive traffic organically .

It works very well for our local language business.
We use a combination of Facebook events and group posts.
That's it really and on an average night we pull in around $1000.
Sometimes we use paid advertising with a small daily budget and it does pull in a few more people, but generally free has worked best for us.

Most of the times, It is hard to reach a large audience organically as Facebook wants to spend you money. The good times ended long back. I will not comment about these so called Gurus. Most of the times their big houses and Ferraris are rented.
But in some scenarios, organic reach has kicked in and worked. We got great success organically for three kind of pages though we did not made them millions of dollars but took them from ground to a very impressive start.
One page was about sustainable living and we were selling H**p seeds etc. With almost zero money spent, we garnered around 3000 followers from Australia. Most of these people are very passionate so even single post get 70+ shares and hundreds of engagement on a day to day basis.
Other was a political page and It has more than 10,000+ likes in less than a month and still gowning.
And the other one is a page of a temple and It has more than 10000 likes too and very high engagement.

To start smtn in facebook you need to know all their rules , after that make a dession.

Facebook has taken a hammering on the stockmarket, and from what l have read in the Financial Review, there will be more of the same, with its new Bitcoin.

So not sure if you want to create a success story on that kind of platform?

Youtube, might work better, although they did have a way of using your views as a list, but have removed that recently.

Although TY, hasn't been dragged through the mud, so it might be a better platform...

good luck.