Facebook
In November 2014, Facebook announced that it will reduce overly promotional page posts in the News Feed. Below is an example of an overly promotional page post:
Image source: Facebook newsroom
This meant that brands could no longer have the same level of organic reach. Thereafter, organic reach dropped drastically while the company smiled to the bank.
Image source: Convince and Convert
A study conducted by Locowise revealed that Facebook pages with over a million likes have 2.27% average organic reach.
The study found that the higher the page likes the less the organic reach and this is expected to near zero by year end.
For example, posts by Beyonce on
her Facebook page with over 63.5 million likes can only reach just around 1.4 million fans if there’s no sponsored content. Beyonce would have to pay to be seen by more than 2.5 percent of her fans on Facebook.
Image source: Facebook
However, there are ways to perform better in terms of organic reach. By publishing content that fascinates the audience (trust me, average is no longer adequate), posting when your target audience is the most active, and posting videos, you can improve your organic reach.
HubSpot has
a great list of tips on how to improve organic reach on Facebook.
Twitter
Twitter is one of the major social media platforms brands use to engage with consumers.
A survey of the top 50 global brands by Forrester revealed that top brands post more frequently on Twitter than on any other social media platform:
Image source: Forrester
The study cited an average of 18.3 posts per week on Twitter.
However, these brands can only reach about
3.61% of their followers with a tweet. Twitter reports this as impressions – the number of times followers see a tweet.
For instance, a brand like Forbes with around 7.8 million followers can only reach just about 281,580 of its followers per tweet.
Image source: Twitter
Also, average interactions on the micro-blogging site are at 0.03%. This means that for every one million Twitter followers there are 300 interactions, according to
this Forrester study.
To increase your Twitter organic reach, leverage real-time events or trending conversations, co-create tweets with influencers, and include auto-expanded photos & videos. These have been proven to
drive organic reach on Twitter according to a survey of 200 brands.