Why did my organic reach drop by 95 percent?

organic reach

[lacika012345]

Hello,

My Facebook pages have had absolutely zero organic reach for external links for weeks. Even if I share any external link to 4-500 thousand people, only 1-2 people click on it and that's it. I also tried to advertise, but no one clicked on that either, while thousands of people clicked on my shares before that.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?

[Benjamin dray]

Hello Questionman I would like to know more about the photo technique and the link in the comments? Personally I know people who redirect and still manage to click but I find it risky. Can you really get a 40% increase? I find it hard to believe that the reach will remain so low and catastrophic for the pages and especially the links! What does Facebook play?

[lacika012345]

For me, as of today, again, I have zero organic reach, no matter if I put an image under the article in a comment or traditionally, a person doesn't click on it. In vain I share it to half a million people, 0 people click from facebook, only and only people come from search engine or directly.I have been in correspondence with the facebook team for months and I keep getting the reply that the dedicated team is looking into my case. I am sure no one is looking at this as they are unable to solve basic problems. I don't even understand the news feed when I look at it from the user side. 90% of what facebook offers is full of rubbish to me...

[porioo]

For us, image with link in the comments works "ok"... it gets us around 5000 to 10000 link clicks. When we post links to our page it gets us around 1000 clicks only. Before we used to get 30000 to 80000 link clicks per articles.

[lacika012345]

porioo

I think I've got a different problem than the average, I've got zero organic reach.
On a 300,000 page, the number of clicks is 50-100 and that's it. But often it's only 10-20.

Today I got this answer again from facebook:

"I understand how important it is for you and for your business as well.

I can certainly understand the urgency of your request and I know that you are waiting from a long time to get an update on your request, However I would like to inform you that your case is still in the safe hands of our internal team and I can see its in progress.

Therefore, we will advise you to kindly wait for the review process to get completed. We will update you once we get an update from our dedicated team.

Your patience and cooperation is highly appreciated on this matter."

I have been in contact with them for months, and the answer is pretty much always the same.

[janvitos]

lacika012345, how did you manage to contact Facebook, if you don't mind? I was only able to contact them when I paid for Meta Verified, but all I got was "There's nothing wrong with your page, it's probably just seasonality". You seem to have some sort of open ticket for your problem, which is certainly a step up from me.

As for your near-zero reach, know that you're not alone. I used to get between 5,000 and 30,000 clicks per link, now I get barely 200 to 500 clicks, sometimes less. Then I switched to images with a link in the comments, which would get me between 1,000 and 5,000 clicks, but now I get less than 500 clicks per post.

So, basically, Facebook is now useless for traffic. I've come to terms with the fact that my once-booming 10-year-old media company is now on the verge of closing its doors for good.

I know a few page owners who say their pages still have some reach on Facebook, but they're seeing the same thing we are: organic reach is dying, and they're preparing for the worst.

It's really incomprehensible that Mark Zuckerberg, who built Facebook on the back of viral media pages, decided to axe their organic reach overnight. But now that he's turned his back on the media and cut virtually all investment in journalism worldwide, I don't see him reversing his decision any time soon.

[gregl512]

Facebook's support has always been totally useless. It's outsourced to some call center somewhere to people without the ability and/or knowledge to fix anything. They have a set of canned responses they continuously copy and paste. Sometimes they'll even copy and paste different names at the bottom of the email, so the name of the person who supposedly wrote the email doesn't match the name on the email address you're getting it from. Back when I was dumb enough pay for advertising on Facebook, I would often come across recurring bugs in trying to set up my ads. I'd submit tickets to Facebook advertising support, who inevitably would tell me it had to be "escalated", but it never would be. Instead their goal was to close the tickets, so I'd constantly get emails from them telling me that if they "didn't hear back from me in 48 hours" my ticket would be closed. Earlier this year I tried to contact the advertising support department about this organic reach issue we're all talking about (since it was the only way I knew to contact anyone at Facebook), but got some canned response describing how organic reach works.

I think Zuckerberg is completely clueless about the current mess that's happening on Facebook. I'm seeing ads on TV here in the US about how "Meta" is helping with medical procedures and surgeries. He seems to have lost total interest in the inner workings of Facebook with his "Meta" obsession. A few months ago I found a legitimate website that had the contact info for Zuckerberg and some other head people at Facebook, so I tried to email them about this organic reach disaster. No response, of course. At one point this year I also got an email from some random Facebook employee asking me to answer a survey about my experience advertising on Facebook. I told her about this reach mess, and got no response from her either.

[lacika012345]

@gregl512

You are right. I've been working on facebook for 10 years and have yet to meet any competent help.

@janvitos
Here you can contact with them in live. If they can't solve your problem, they'll email you.
[facebook.com...]

[questionman40]

@Benjamin dray
Sorry for late reply, 40% for some posts but most of posts are 10% - 20%

@porioo
Hi can you tell us, how many followers you have to get those clicks?

I don't see any update so far about link posts, i see many popular pages do now this with images with link on title or under the image
I don't know which one is better and i also wonder how many clicks they got from this

About my clicks now. I have over 200k followers i get 100clicks to 1.000, sometimes even less than 100, so nothing really changed so far
should i had million followers to hit 10.000 clicks.. this really bad
Before 1 year 1 of my links could reach 20.000 clicks and others over 1.000 for sure.

If you guys have any new please update and if forum allow us to have a group call to change opinions about it

[Benjamin dray]

Hello everybody, I am very surprised at the beginning of October, the reach has returned for me. I manage to produce very good stats to see over time.

[lacika012345]

@Benjamin dray
This happens continuously, it gets better for 1-2 weeks, then slowly goes back down to zero. Since April, it has improved 3 times for me. Always good for 1-2 weeks, then zero for at least 1 month. I explain in vain to facebook, they just don't want to understand, or are they really that stupid.

Now on my 200,000 member pages the number of views is 400-500 and clicks are about 20-50 and that's it. For some reason our articles don't get into the news feed at this time...

This morning was the negative peak so far, with 3-4 people online on the websites.

[porioo]

@Benjamin dray

Good to know! Did you change anything? Your website URL? Change something in the code of your website? Change the way you wrote articles? Or the reach just appeared like that randomly?

[Benjamin dray]

I work with several media in France. What's interesting is that I can conduct my own tests by publishing several certified media on Facebook. I noticed several things: - some sites have much less reach than others, - the click rate is different from one site to another. Facebook must use a quality control system by measuring several points using its AI. My page is often put in suggestion and strangely I have full access to the links. This must be seen as a guarantee of quality. Very important point: I noticed that they made an update on the page recommendation page. Before I had flagged links several times a week, now nothing. They have finally rectified these algorithm problems which punished at all costs. Still, the reach should perhaps be corrected one day or another otherwise a lot of media will leak. I saw an article on CNN that talked about this spectacular drop. Let's hope it gets publicized

[questionman40]

@Benjamin dray

Hi Benjamin can you tell us how you post your links? (directly, images or in comments)
I was flagged also and now not but it's the same for me, still recommend my page even when it was flagged so i don't think this is the problem

I see some suggested pages with much less followers getting tons of reactions with link on image, i wonder how many clicks they have
I don't know how they do it, trying to find the best way to post and get as much clicks possible
If you have any update please tell me

[lacika012345]

It happens to me all the time, sometimes I get better for 2-3 weeks, start to feel happy, then it stagnates, slowly starts to decrease, and then zero for weeks. There's no logic to it, I'm sure for some reason a lot of pages were pushed down like this to get all the silly videos and ads in the newsfeed... But for many people, everything is the same, which is very impressive.

I attached a link of clicks to show the difference after 1 week. I showed to facebook and they just doesn't understand where the problem is... Or just doesn't want to understand.

[imgur.com...]

[questionman40]

@lacika012345

The numbers you show are fine, i had to see over 5.000 clicks from last year
You have some 6k, 2k clicks, its normal some links to get 100 clicks and less

My links never pass the 1k easily, needs to be viral post and suggested to people and i am close to 300k followers same as you

[Benjamin dray]

Hello,

I found this article from Digiday who managed to get people responsible for Facebook. What is said in this article is incredible. This could correlate with what support was saying a few months ago.

[digiday.com...]

Publishers are still feeling the effects of a change Facebook made in May that caused a steep decline in referral traffic to publishers’ sites.

In conversations with Digiday, four publishing executives — who all requested to remain anonymous in order to preserve their relationships with Meta — referred to a “bug” that was unintentionally introduced when Meta made a change to Facebook’s algorithm in May. The execs told Digiday they were informed by Meta that the platform was aware of the issue and that publishers could expect referral traffic to return to normal in a few months’ time.

“We were notified at the end of June that the rollout of a new page experience within Facebook caused a bug which prevented link posts from being properly served by the algorithm to a page’s audience,” one publishing exec told Digiday. “It’s our understanding that a fix to the bug is currently being worked on, but we do not have visibility into the status or its priority.”

Source : Digiday

[edited by: not2easy at 11:56 am (utc) on Oct 13, 2023]
[edit reason] edited to Fair Use limits (see ToS) [/edit]

[ghostofseo]

well facebook is an advertising company. Organic reach seems dead. I went through many of horrible support request. Finally they said our content was shadowbanned... We have around 4,000 followers.

Any organic post we do sees no engagement. Any ads we run sees lots of engagement. See where I'm going here..

Sad to say but you need to pay to play these days.

[questionman40]

@Benjamin dray

Good to see that, but the question is when reach will come back on links
I see the last days only some of images with link in comments small increase but nothing compare to the reach from last year

@ghostofseo

I don't think with 4,000 followers you could have organic reach even in the old good days,
with 200k+ followers and struggle for 1k organic clicks

I see some pages on my suggested with 20k followers having some crazy reach in some of their posts without even running ads, i dunno how they do this..

[lacika012345]

I think the biggest problem here is that some people have 1-1.5 million followers on their page (like me), and they barely reach a thousand people. While others have 20 thousand followers on their page and consistently reach 10-50 thousand people. Something is very wrong with facebook, and it is very unfair...

I've just had a few days of reach, and was switched off at noon today. I had 400 people online on my website, and then it suddenly went to 20. I can't imagine what they keep switching some people...

[Benjamin dray]

I really think this is the end of links on Facebook. I went from 2000 clicks per link to 40/200 maximum. It's a shame. Facebook doesn't give a damn about sinking all the media and journalists in the world. Supposedly it was a bug in the new page version which was to be resolved in 4 months from May

[lacika012345]

@Benjamin dray

You are right, but there are 2 things,
The first thing is, there are a lot of media where no reach changes have been made since facebook changed. Why is that?
The second thing, If Facebook kills links, who will produce videos for them? Because the media won't if they don't get anything in return, I'm sure. Right now, a lot of the media are still producing videos to see if that will help reach people, but I don't think it helps anything.

[Benjamin dray]

@lacika So what does this mean in concrete terms? Is Facebook likely to go back and unblock reach as before? People are older on Facebook than on TikTok. It's risky in my opinion to completely turn to a model similar to TikTok. People don't want to see 100% reels/videos in their news feed. Already the suggestions are becoming rubbish...

[questionman40]

@lacika012345

Totally agree with that, this is why we need to find a fix for organic reach because all this work to build a page may took 2, 5 years maybe more
Can't imagine the ads many people spend to make a good page for their website and now this happen..

Anyone saw any increase the last 2 weeks? I saw a very small increase on images with link in comments, but very small

[gregl512]

So here's something interesting that shows Facebook's true motives (in case they weren't already clear). I'm not sure if it's happened across the board or just to some accounts like mine. At some point today, the "insights" button disappeared that had always been showing underneath everything I posted on my business page. Clicking on "insights" would always show you details on reach and interaction for each post --- although most of the time it was incorrect, delayed, and glitchy. That "insights" button has been removed from all my past posts today. In its place, they're now trying to convince me to boost every post.

Underneath all my posts it now says either "Boost this post to reach up to 824 more people if you spend $14" or "Boost this post to reach up to 1011 more people if you spend $42". As you can see, there's a fairly large price difference that it's randomly assigning to these "boost post" prices with no logic to it --- all my posts are landscape photography scenes posted days apart from each other with similar low numbers of likes and reach. Facebook used to recommend when I'd post things that I should boost them for $14 to get 800-900 in reach. Suddenly, as I'm now scrolling down through all my older posts, it has randomly assigned them either the $14/824 number (which would be 1.7 cents a person) or the $42/1,011 number (which would be 4.2 cents a person) underneath every post. I can't say I've ever "boosted" anything as I've been fed up ever since they knocked down my organic reach earlier this year, but with this move it seems blatantly clear why organic reach has declined for most and what the end game is.

[gregl512]

As an update to my post from earlier today, now Facebook has changed the numbers around. All my posts that said earlier "Boost this post to reach up to 824 more people if you spend $14" now say "Boost this post to reach up to 592 more people if you spend $14" --- apparently they're trying to make their new increase in "boost" pricing seem more logical.

[questionman40]

Hey again everyone, i didn't see any improve on organic link clicks this month i think became little worst for me

I keep seeing on my suggested some posts with tons of reactions and link on posts and also having less followers from me,
i really don't know how they do this..

Any update from anyone this month?

[gregl512]

"I keep seeing on my suggested some posts with tons of reactions and link on posts and also having less followers from me, i really don't know how they do this.."

I've bee noticing the same thing. And a lot of times they'll post something one day and get around 100 likes, and the next day they'll post and get over 1,000 likes. It makes no sense. I can only assume Facebook is "suggesting" their posts constantly, or that they're paying to boost posts.

Today I was looking at another small business Facebook page in my industry that has almost the identical number of followers as my page, but had way more likes on their posts in the past few months (basically they have the number of likes I had last year). I was trying to figure out what they were doing differently --- the only thing I noticed was that they randomly post 3 or 4 things in the same day, and other days only post 1 thing, and some days post nothing. One of the things I haven't tried is posting multiple times a day, but I might try it.

[questionman40]

@gregl512
I notice that too, many small pages around 10k - 50k followers have tons of reactions compare to mine that has over 200k
even with links on their posts and also they don't run ads

This is so unfair we need to find a way to fix that.
If anyone found something about organic reach and post clicks please reply

[lacika012345]

What is even more interesting to me is that pages with 30-40 million followers have fewer reactions than pages with 20-30 thousand people. Doesn't facebook think this is a shame for them? We also have Facebook pages in Hungary that are followed by roughly 30,000 people, and each of their links is liked by 1-2,000 people. And on my pages with 200-300 thousand followers, there is almost no reaction.

It is also a huge shame for Facebook that it is full of news feed image/comment links. Plus cheesy foreign language videos...

[questionman40]

They should give us at least 2% organic link clicks

For example for 200k followers that i have they should give me 2k on my link post
instead of this they give me 100clicks and in a new page maybe they will give them more than mine..
Doesn't make sense, should be a trick or something that they do and have those numbers on posts..