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?

[lacika012345]

gregl512

I did it last week and merged the whole thing into a new page, so it's pretty good in terms of reach, but who knows for how long.

[lacika012345]

I've tried long term merged facebook pages, but it's worse than ever, shared to 300,000 people, clicked on by 5 or so and it's over. Images/text posts get huge reach, but that only makes money for Facebook. I think it's time to close the whole business...

[gregl512]

I haven't tried merging my old page into a new one yet, as I've been thinking that maybe whatever settings are built into the old page that's causing the horrible reach would move over to the new one, thus accomplishing nothing. My old page continues to get worse and worse reach, and since the only thing I post are photos, photos aren't the magic answer. I've actually been getting better engagement on Twitter lately, where I have only about 40 followers (vs 1,800 on FB). Fake/spam accounts on FB have risen a ton in the past few months (usually the profile photos are of pretty Asian or Russian women), and they all seem to have at least 1,000 followers somehow. The other thing that's going on is that these fake accounts are creating groups on Facebook, and those groups are getting far more reach and engagement than much larger groups that were actually created by real people. I've discovered that if I post in one of these groups created by a fake account (or which has a fake account as a moderator), the engagement on my posts is much higher than anywhere else on FB. I only discovered some of these groups because FB recommended them to me. I think since most real people are abandoning FB, FB is either fully allowing these fake accounts to thrive to pretend it has more users than it actually does, or someone at FB is actually creating them, which is why these groups run by fake accounts have more reach than anyone or anything else on FB at the moment.

[engine]

Those scammer groups have become quite prevalent in recent times. I almost fell for one myself and wanted to make a correction to false info. After I hit submit I realised my error and removed my correction and promptly left the group.

I've been using the report facility quite frequently, however, FB is very bad at picking up on scams and other bad actors. It is relying on an algorithm which is seriously bad at getting it right.
Even when a report is rejected, I report it again in the hope that the AI will eventually learn.

We have to face the fact that FB is swamped with scammers and bad actors as it's a treasure trove of information for those that want to take advantage.

[lacika012345]

Yes, Facebook has completely forgotten to address the real problems, just to give the appearance of high numbers. I can name 10 errors off the top of my head and they have been going on for months. The biggest is that I have not had a news feed for months and several people I know have this problem. This too can obviously affect reach. Even though I have a large number of new pages, link reach is completely blocked, no matter what kind of website. I've also shared a website where the reach is good, and I don't have that either, so I'm "punished" as admin. The image reach on the new pages (300k pages) has become very interesting, because the reach is usually 200-400 000, for the link it is 100-500 and that is all.

Currently I have 3 pages with 3 x 300 000 people, but I claim that there are facebook pages that get more hits with 10 000 people...

[engine]

Only today I appealed yet another post they refused to take down saying it doesn't go against their community standards. It's with the Oversight Board, and it'll take another couple of weeks for the review.

BTW, if you're still using Pages, you might want to seriously consider creating a Group for the visibility. For years now Pages have been Facebook's least favourite child. Groups are the favourite.

[gregl512]

Has anyone tried experimenting with the "@followers" tag on posts? I just heard about it 2 weeks ago, and tried it for the first time yesterday. It did seem to cause my post to reach some followers I hadn't heard from in months (the reach so far is about the same, but the engagement is higher), but I'm not sure if it was a fluke or an effective long-term strategy. If you haven't heard of it, basically you type @followers in your post somewhere, and it will notify some of your followers that they've been mentioned in your post. It doesn't seem to work for scheduled posts though; only ones you're writing at the time. I'm going to try using it a few more times with posts I'm trying to get more activity on to see what the results are.

[lacika012345]

And where do you write the word followers? In a comment or in the post? A will try it

[gregl512]

If you type the @ symbol, it should come up as an option, and will be clickable in your post (even though clicking on it just takes you to an error page). I noticed that if I just type the whole phrase "@followers" it doesn't register correctly. It can be in the post itself or a comment from what I've read.

[engine]

Please use that sparingly because it can anger followers, in a similar way to using other such tags.

[lacika012345]

I will now start sharing links in comments. Does anyone know if facebook there also looks at featured images that may have come from elsewhere? Because I think I've always been spammed for something so far. I guess it's because I didn't post individual images for the posts. Anyone have any experience with links in comments? What are the so-called unwritten rules here?

[allhearts]

@lacika012345,

I have heard from a few people who have pages and post an image, link in comments and they do get better reach but that will only work if you have a page (post an image, and the link on the comments then pin that comment so it's always at the top of the comments), I have a group and cannot do that, as you can't pin comments on a group post, so unfortunately the comment would keep moving downward as members add new comments.

[gregl512]

I've been using the "@followers" tag for 5 posts now and figured I'd share my initial results and see if anyone else using the tag is experiencing the same.

Back in 2022 (before Facebook screwed everything up in the spring of 2023), I was reaching at least 60% of my followers with almost all of my posts. When they changed their algorithm in the spring of last year, my reach dropped to about 25% of my followers. In the fall of last year, it dropped even further, so that I'm only reaching about 10% of my followers, which is where it currently stands. These numbers are pretty much consistent, no matter what I post.

Before I started using the @followers tag, it was obvious the same people were being shown my posts repeatedly, as, with a few exceptions, the same people were liking every post. Additionally, engagement was non-existent. FB almost consistently claimed it would show my posts to 200 people, but the engagement rate averaged around 15%.

Once I started using the tag, suddenly all my followers I hadn't heard from in months started engaging with my posts. The engagement rate has shot up from 15% to around 40%. What has not changed that much, however, is reach. Back in 2022, when a post became popular with a lot of engagement and likes, the reach would expand rather quickly. That, however, is no longer the case. It's clear that FB has reach set to a certain limit for those of us being affected by this mess, and no matter how popular your post may become, that reach level is only going to change by a small fraction --- i.e. instead of getting a reach of 200 (the new standard for my page), it may go up to 300 --- unlike in 2022 where popular posts would reach over 1,000 people.

The other interesting thing when using the @followers tag is that it looks like FB will not always notify the same group of people. After 5 posts using the tag, about 50% of the people engaging with my posts had not engaged with any of the prior 4 posts using the tag. So, unlike before using the tag when I almost always had the same group of people engaging with my posts, using the tag has expanded my audience to other followers.

So...if you're looking to increase engagement rates and show your posts to a wider audience, using the @followers tag seems to accomplish that. It's the only thing I've tried in a year now that's actually had a positive effect for me. I'm next going to try not using the tag on a future post and see if engagement crashes, which I assume it will.

[iluvatoq]

I can't use the followers tag on some of my pages.

[gregl512]

I've been playing around with the @followers tag for about a month now. The initial ability I had when using it to reach new followers I hadn't heard from in the past fell apart after about 2 weeks. Just like when I hadn't been using it, using the followers tag is now showing the same set of people my posts routinely. So I'm no longer reaching new people with it --- it's the same set of 200-300 people routinely that I'm seeing engage with my posts over and over again.

The one positive effect of using it is that I'm definitely getting more engagement with it, as some people are being notified when I post something. The engagement rate on my posts, while still 25% of what it used to be back in 2022, has jumped up by about 50%.

[PetroKal]

I think the pages have reached the bottom. all in zero almost 20 days.

[gregl512]

"I think the pages have reached the bottom. all in zero almost 20 days."

Most of the various FB groups I belong to have had the lowest engagement I've ever seen in the past 2-3 weeks. The only groups with high engagement are the ones that have been started by fake/scam accounts. And then more scam accounts flood the groups started by other scam accounts and start posting nonsense in those groups to make their accounts more popular. At the moment FB has more activity from scam accounts than from real people.

[Ahmad_Qaisi]

Hi all

since first of April one of my pages is doing really well, each post got 10k - 40k likes
my online analytics from 150 - 350 real time .

and still working fine till today - around 30 days.

still the other pages are suffering. hope that it will continue working like this.

[Ahmad_Qaisi]

By the way ... I have done nothing .. also one of my friend owns 5 pages .... only one of them has recovered from zero reach

[Ahmad_Qaisi]

back to zero reach :(

[System]

The following 12 messages were cut out to new thread by brett_tabke. New thread at: facebook/5120151.htm [webmasterworld.com]
9:59 am on Apr 14, 2025 (cst -6)