Organic Reach is dead. Although not entirely true, I've heard this countless times, and for good reason. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, Organic Reach is the number of free impressions you get from your page's posts. Advertisers across the board have seen a dramatic decline in their post reach over the past 18 months. While this is obviously disappointing, it's also somewhat explainable. Put simply, the amount of time people spend on Facebook has not risen at the same scale as the amount of content posted to Facebook. These posts include paid ads, and that guy who has to mention he's at the gym, every time he's at the gym. Here's an even more detailed explanation directly from the Facebook For Business blog. No matter how you phrase it, you're still going to have challenges getting reach with your page posts. So, the question is; to boost, or not to boost?
While boosting your organic posts may seem counter intuitive, you'll want to focus on your ultimate goal, exposing your brand message to your target audience.. I see many pages that frequently post high quality content, only to receive 5 or 6 post engagements. To say the least, this must be frustrating for person who took the time to create such great content. And that's what we should be focused on, the time it took to create content, and the amount of exposure it received. Now, lets take a look at the cost of boosting versus not boosting your post, as it relates to the end goal of exposure. To do so, I'll model out the reach and cost per reach results of creating three ads, versus creating one ad with a boost. In order to gauge organic post reach, I'll use the data from a recent Locowise report, which estimates this to be about 4.11% of your total page audience.
We'll also use the following parameters for this scenario.
- Page Fan's: 1,000
- Target Audience: Individuals interested in "Social Media Marketing"
Let's say the person creating these ads makes minimum wage, which in New York is $8.75. I'll also need you to pretend this person doesn't laugh hysterically at the job offer, and decides to stick around at least until after lunch. Now, let's say it takes about 30 minutes to think of a post, write the copy, and find creative to accompany it.
Three posts would take 90 minutes to create, and cost just over $13 in dirty cheap labor. Given the findings from the Locowise report, we'd expect these posts to get a combined reach of 123 (1000 fans *4.11% reach * 3 posts), at a cost of about $.11 ($13/123) for each person reached.
Now, we'll discover what would happen if we made just one post, and added a very small boost budget.
With a labor cost of $4.38, and boost budget of $2.00, total cost would be $6.38. But, look how much the reach changes. You're now reaching around 420 people, with a total cost of only $.02 ($6.38/420) per person reached!
That being said, you may be better off making fewer posts, and adding a little to boost to the ones you spend time creating. However, be sure to properly target your boosted post in order to reach your intended audience. For a detailed walk-through on how to boost a post, check out this handy guide from Facebook.