Facebook's Post Reach Falls Like A Rock

Facebook is the largest social network by far with over 1.3 billion users, but its effectiveness as a promotional tool is dropping almost to the point where it's not worth even using despite those large user numbers. A new study by Forrester Research called Social Strategies That Work shows that a post may only reach as few as 2% of followers, making many artists look at the entire process and say,"Why bother?"

Up until about 3 years ago (before Facebook went public), if you had 100 fans or followers, a post would reach all of them. This dropped to about 15 (or 15%) when Facebook began monetizing its platform by requiring you to promote the post in order to reach all your followers. In other words, a post would only reach about 15 of your 100 followers unless you paid to promote it, in which case all 100 would see it.

This declined even further last year to around 6%, and now Forrester says it's down to 2%, which means that only 2 of your 100 followers will see your post unless you pay to promote it.

Yes, it's possible that these figures can go higher on an occasional post, depending upon a number of conditions set forth by Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm, which measures how relevant a post is and who sees it, but don't count on it.

Forrester suggests that advertisers move to smaller social networks with less competition and better platform terms, but that won't necessarily work if not enough of your followers are there. And by the way, the study also puts Twitter in the same category as Facebook in requiring payment to access all of your followers.

Advertising on Facebook can actually be highly effective, but it also comes with some quirks (like text in graphics can take up no more than 20% of the graphic's area) that make it challenging. That said, if you continue to use Facebook for promotion, you'll have to be prepared to spend some money to do so.

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