The End of Free Traffic from Facebook

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and without doubt one of the most used platforms for advertising today. Every service, company, brand in addition to the need to have a website is required to have a page on Facebook to reach their customers on this social network and the free traffic from Facebook always occupy a great volume in total social traffic. In short, Facebook is one of the best free traffic channels for brands and services.

Recent studies, however, has shown that this trend may be coming to an end. Recent monitoring and measuring shows that the organic reach metric (the number of people who see non-advertising updates from your page) is constantly decreasing. According to Social @ Ogilvy, the index fell from about 12% to 6%. This number for big fan pages with 500k likes and above is even lower, decreasing from 4.04% to 2.1%.

Organic reach from Facebook has been declining steadily for months. Source: Social @Ogilvy

This decrese in Organic reach comes from Facebook’s changing algorithms of displaying fan page updates on the newsfeed to better suit the tastes of the user. Facebook prioritizing displaying contents which are estimated to be reasonable on newsfeed (ie. Posts with photos will be preferable to text statuses). However, with the increasing frequency of the emergence of fan pages, with more followers, the number of posts from fan pages is increasing, so the amount of contents for newsfeeds exceeds the extent at which users can view. Because of this, Facebook must constantly update the algorithms to keep newsfeeds from being overwhelmed by information that users do not want to see. The result of adjusting these algorithms is the downturn in the organic reach of fan pages. But this is just one of the reasons, in the writer’s opinion, Facebook’s main purpose is to encourage users to use Facebook ads to reach more people through advertising through which to bring more profit for this social network.

This trend will continue in the upcoming time, and many marketers will be having a headache while looking for ways to increase engagement and drive traffic to their services as organic reach decreases. However, to promote on social networks, content should be what to be aimed for and invested on. The good content and catching the customer’s needes will be easier to get viral and more effective. Of course, if conditions permit, it is better to advertise for good contents to reach more people, maximizing efficiency.

Maybe the era when you have free traffic from Facebook is not going to last longer but that is what marketer have to accept and make changes in advertising strategies to get better results in the future.