We’re not breaking any news by saying that Organic Reach on Facebook has fallen considerably. That’s the reality, and while engagement can significantly increase reach, the Facebook world seems to be moving toward a pay-to-play platform for business pages, specifically through boosting.
What we wanted to figure out was how posting frequency affects Organic Reach, if at all. Here’s what we discovered:
We collected data on 200 business pages that post content on a daily basis and 200 pages that post every other day and measured the impressions for the five most recent posts as a percentage of the Likes on the page. For example, if a page with 563 Page Likes has recent post impressions of…
- 21 (3.73%)
- 35 (6.22%)
- 37 (6.57%)
- 58 (10.3%)
- 52 (9.24%)
Given this data, the example page would have a Total Average Impression Rate is 7.21%. After collecting this data for 200 pages, we then simply averaged all the Total Average Impression Rates.
Here’s a chart of Impression Rates by number of Page Likes for Pages posting content daily after removing outliers (you can hover over data points to see Likes and Impression Rate):
And here’s the same chart for those Pages posting every other day:
These charts may seem basically identical until you take a look at the X-axes. There, you’ll see that the average page posting daily is somewhere between 0% and 15%, whereas the average page posting every other day is between 0% and 40%.
This leads me to the bottom line of my findings: Pages posting daily averaged a 12.72% impression rate. Those posting every other day averaged a 25.8%, almost exactly double.
One other discrepancy you might notice, is the Y-axes of the graphs. One is nearly half of the other, here’s why:
-The Pages we studied that post daily had an average of 423 Likes.
-The Pages posting every other day averaged 224.5 Likes.
Clearly, we want to reduce the number of variables in this study, and this large difference could definitely affect the data. To eliminate this variable as a possible cause of the difference in Impression Rate, we singled out Pages posting daily with less than 1,000 Page Likes. This reduced the Page Likes average to 281.3, and the Average Impression Rate was still only 13.79%.
So, what does this all mean? This data indicates that less is more, to a certain extent. Posting content every other day on a Facebook business page appears to result in a higher Reach/Impression Rate than posting daily. Take these findings into account when scheduling your posts and sharing content. Over-posting may reduce the number of people who see a post that’s really important to you and your business!