Why did my organic reach drop?

[gregl512]

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System: The following 12 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/facebook/5085877.htm [webmasterworld.com] by brett_tabke - 9:59 am on Apr 14, 2025 (cst -6)

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The only people doing well on Facebook these days are scam accounts and criminals. Here in the United States, more and more people with large amounts of followers are having their accounts hacked into and taken over by criminals. Meta is doing absolutely nothing to help them.

I'm in the photography industry, and although I only have about 2,000 followers, I'm often looking at other photographer's business pages that have large amounts of followers (100,000+). Most of them are still not getting the reach they should be.

As has been discussed before on here, there are still certain pages Facebook has selected to promote for no real reason that continue to reach a ton of people --- there's one photographer I follow who posts a lot of very mediocre content. She started her page in December and has managed to acquire 8,000 followers in 5 months, which is virtually impossible for most people. She claims she's done it by inviting people to like her page after posting in groups --- which, having done so myself, rarely results in people actually following your page. Most people ignore invitations to follow your page. She has told me she has never run ads or paid to boost posts. If you compare her page of 8,000 followers to a much better photographer posting just as often who may have over 100,000 followers and only gets a fraction of her engagement, it makes no sense.

About a month ago I was randomly selected by Meta to participate in a "user experience" survey where I had a video chat with one of their employees. It was just as pointless as I expected it would be. Meta is living in a parallel universe where they still think "hate speech" is the biggest problem on their platform. I tried to explain that lack of reach and scams/frauds are the actual biggest problems. The Meta employee acted like this was news to him and didn't want to talk about it. He said Meta has "hundreds" of user experience researchers like him --- and yet apparently none of them have any idea what's actually going on their platform; either that, or they just don't care.

[PetroKal]

How are you doing? I think the last 10 days everything is going bad.

[lacika012345]

Has organic reach dropped further for anyone else recently?
Even though I share links in the comments, they are hardly seen, no clicks, almost as many reach as if I just shared the links.

[Xyborg]

Have you checked if Meta enabled monetization for your pages? we had the bonuses first, and then after completing 2 months on it, they enabled the rev share creator monetization, basically they pay for the reach you get, and for us so far is working well (nothing like we used to earn via ads on our site back then), but it good to have that extra money. They are pushing for more image based posts for this kind of monetization. (More post, more ad placements)

[PetroKal]

The new year came with 90% drop in reach again.

Does this happen to others?

[lacika012345]

Yes, organic reach was suppressed again in January, and many Facebook pages stopped sharing.

[gregl512]

I haven't posted on Facebook in about 6 months as I got tired of being bombarded with scam groups and AI images, while my followers would see nothing I posted.

I noticed now that you can pay to be "Meta Verified", starting at $12/month here in the United States, and going up to several hundred dollars a month for fancier "verified" plans. Has anyone tried paying to be "verified" to see if that increased their engagement/reach at all? This must be a new feature they're offering, as the last time I tried to get verified early last year I was told I wasn't allowed to and they didn't even give me the option to pay to be verified.

[lacika012345]

I tried the verified subscription, it's no good. You get a few extra emojis for it and that's it. It doesn't help anything with the pages. In fact, their support is no better.
Basically, we get a checkmark next to our name for a good price and that's it. This is just another source of revenue for Facebook.

[Xyborg]

Verification won't help at all. Focus on creating more pieces of content, try different formats. Use text, then comment with the pictures or links, it's more work yes, there are also some tools for automating this as well. But Meta is pushing each type of content to the users that interact more with that type of content (some users prefer text post, other pictures, other videos, etc.) Use the stories, they will help you push your reach. Be patient. And, as I said before, check if you can start enabling Meta monetization, first they will offer you the stars (it's sh*t, doesn't work unless you do a lot of live streaming), and then they will enable bonuses and content monetization. We are doing VERY well with the last one now, they are throwing away money to increase their ad inventory (take more Google display €€). So, use it.

I know it's not fair, but currently, this is the only way to keep the content getting some reach now. Post MORE regularly, and you will start noticing Meta pushing your content to more and more non-followers. Some times they bury your post for days, and then they use it and you see the sudden spike in the reach. We went from posting only photos and links, to text status (plain text and with color background) + photo post + gallery posts + stories, and it has been good during the past 3 months.

Another thing I tried, and it worked for link posts only. Create an ad, use a big rectangular (vertical) image, only one image, and leave it paused (campaign, ad asset, ad). Then inside the Business manager, go to the Page Posts section, you will see your ads in there, and schedule or post them as a dark post. As Meta take those as natively ads, the reach is far higher than a regular organic link post. For the user, they see the same, an organic post, but this one with a bigger preview image takes more screen, and has higher reach. I've been using this for the past year, I discovered this by accident, and it worked pretty well. Now I am focusing more on monetization on Meta side, as I get 5x the money I did with the ads on my site. But try it!

I hope this helps you some way.

[lacika012345]

I think the biggest problem here is that some people are privileged and whatever happens they always have organic reach. I look at the international facebook pages, that's what happens there. I'm sure some people know people on Facebook who are taking care of this. For the rest of us 90% of facebook pages today are constantly fluctuating, 1 week of reach, then 1 week of zero. I just had 2 good weeks, 200-500 likes on my posts, now 5-10. And I know in advance that it will be like this for 1-2 weeks now, I can share anything, I have completely turned off the reach consciously. And on the user side, the problem is that I don't see anything from the pages I've visited, or from friends' posts, I just get my mouth full of facebook's stupid videos with hundreds of thousands of likes...

[gregl512]

"I look at the international facebook pages, that's what happens there."

Yes, the problem is that Facebook is operating differently in each country. For example, I've been trying to merge two of my pages for over a year now. The last time I tried it I contacted the "support" department multiple times, only to eventually learn the feature wasn't available at the moment. I was over on Reddit, and there are a few people on there who claim they've merged their pages in the past 2 months, while many (like me) haven't been able to do it in at least a year. And two of the people who managed to do it were posting instructions in French and another language, with links to pages which didn't work when I tried them, so I can only assume it's still working in some other countries.

It's also been clear to me that Facebook randomly favors certain people. I'm in the photography field, so I mainly follow people who just post photos. Yesterday I discovered a photographer whose full-time job was working as a programmer at Facebook up until 2023. Not surprisingly, his reach and engagement is way higher than photographers with 5 times the followers who have had their pages up long before his. I've also seen quite a few professional photographers with 100k-300k followers who can't get nearly the engagement that some amateur photographer (with inferior photos) is getting with 15k followers. The only difference I can tell is that those with lots of engagement often have followers who aren't very intelligent that spend hours every day on Facebook sharing a ton of nonsense memes and images --- and with the excessive amount of bots and spam accounts on Facebook these days, I question how much of that engagement is real. That used to be the problem I had when I ran ads; Facebook would show my ads to people who could barely string a sentence together and whose pages would be filled with cat memes. So they'd give me lots of engagement, but I knew wouldn't be buying anything. But even all those "cat meme" people stopped seeing my stuff a few years ago when this organic reach fiasco started.

[PetroKal]

What's been happening in the last 10 days? 90% drop again?

[lacika012345]

Very interesting things have been happening to me for about 6 days now, no one sees the shares, it's not really a 90 percent drop, it's a total lockout...

[allhearts]

I have noticed a huge drop in traffic from my large Facebook group since yesterday (April 20th - Easter Sunday).

My group is 7 years old, has over 290,000 members, and although I engage a lot (read, like every comment, and anwser all questions in the comments since the beginning), my reach gets worst from month to month.

As of 2 days ago, I had 25,000 active members average on a daily basis of late on this group, since yesterday, it has gone down to 17,000.

I also mix in/add new content on a daily basis, what is going on?

[PetroKal]

Guys, what's going on? Pages are sending 1-2 clicks? Do you also have 99% reduction in last 15 days?

[lacika012345]

Yes, I don't know what they're doing, but the nonsense has started again. Once again, I'm seeing stupid videos in my news feed. If several people happen to click on one of my shares, it's over in 20 minutes. I don't understand why they're doing this...

[allhearts]

I definitely know why my traffic from Facebook dropped by 100% this week, my group with 300,000 members got hacked, and I was removed and banned from it.

[lacika012345]

Does anyone else have this problem where no one sees your posts 20 minutes after sharing them? What Facebook is doing is crazy. I share a post with 1 million people, 500 click on it, but 10-20 minutes later no one is looking at it. There is absolutely no virality. This has been happening to me for a month. Facebook has really messed something up...

[PetroKal]

It's been happening to me for a month now. It's like the post is being hidden.

[engine]

I share a post with 1 million people, 500 click on it, but 10-20 minutes later no one is looking at it.

Actually, it's been going on for years, but has gotten much worse.
Perhaps you didn't notice it so much previously.

[PetroKal]

If you go to your page's statistics, you will see that in the last 1-2 months, its reach has dropped by 80%.

[PetroKal]

The pages died. No matter how big the page is, there is zero traffic.