Facebook explains decline in organic reach on social media site

Facebook has moved to explain why businesses are seeing a drop in their organic reach on the social media site.

Vice president of ads, product marketing and Atlas solutions, Brian Boland, has responded to the questions received by Facebook regarding the issue.

At the end of last year (2013), Facebook revealed that it had made changes to its News Feed algorithm in order to ensure that its users saw content more relevant to them in their own feed. In the aftermath of this change, many businesses with Facebook pages saw their organic reach decline.

Boland explained that organic reach is a term used to describe the numbers of users a Facebook page owner can reach for free through posts published on the page.

He then went onto explain: "Rather than showing people all possible content, News Feed is designed to show to each person on Facebook the content that's most relevant to them. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300.

"To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks reach possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person," he wrote in a blog post.

He attributed the growth in people and businesses using Facebook, for social media marketing purposes, as a contributing factor to the drop-off - with Facebook pages competing with other pages, friends and advertisers to appear in the News Feeds of user.

However, Boland stated that organic content was still valuable, adding: "Organic content  still has value on Facebook, and pages that publish great content - content that teaches people something, entertains them, make them think, or in some way adds value to their lives - can still reach people in News Feed."

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