05 Sep Do boosted posts reduce organic reach?
Are they trying to trick us into boosting more posts?
Simple answer? No! 🙅🏼♀️
With ads, we’re paying for impressions (eyeballs 👀) so they will push whatever we want (within reason and Terms Of Service, of course!) to an audience – but how high or low quality those eyeballs are, and how fresh the audience is (aka new eyeballs or the same ones on repeat) might be dictated by the quality of the ad – plus other factors such as bid, competition etc.
With organic posting, they don’t discourage promotion however they do care about the users’ experience first and foremost (as without them there’s no advertising dollars) so they don’t wish for it to be overly promotional all of the time.
A post that tells a story or shows something humanistic will usually out-perform a post that straight up says “buy this t-shirt for $29.00“, because the engagement rate and response rate will be higher from the audience, prompting Facebook to treat it accordingly. Simply put, if it’s interesting and the end user likes it, it is more likely to perform well. Paid or not paid!
Many business owners – I have found – note two things when they boost posts:
2. “the organic reach on my boosted post is better than the paid reach! What’s the point of boosting, then?”
1. “After I boosted a post, my other posts didn’t reach anyone. So, DO boosted posts reduce organic reach?”
The answer to these questions is actually simpler than you might expect.
For 1, when you boost a post – more people see it. When more people see it, more people are likely to interact with it. When more people interact with the post, more people see it organically – not because you paid for them to see it, but because the interaction pushes the post out into friends’ feeds.
And for 2, It’s likely you feel this way because the last post did really well (because you paid for the reach to be increased) and possibly because the content just… wasn’t that great. Harsh, but likely true. Going by the above – humanistic versus promotional content – ask yourself: Do you really like this post, or does the audience? Sometimes, we love a post because we love our business and are proud of our work, but the feeling from the public isn’t mutual.
Meta want you to pay to boost everything, because it’s a business. But they don’t hamper engagement intentionally, hoping it will trick people into paying to boost because this would actively punish pages and business for using the platform as intended.
The focus is to keep the platform/app user happy and entertained, so they keep using the apps. If we don’t, they will show less of us because we’re interfering with the end user experience – enjoying their feed 🤩
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Curious about the costs that come with running your business on social media? Design Rush have written a detailed blog breaking down the basics, average social media advertising cost and factors that play into the cost of running organic and paid ad campaigns on social media. You can find the details here: Design Rush Social Media Advertising Cost
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About the Author
Jess Riches is a Co-Founder of Enriches Business, Social Media Marketing Expert and Creative Marketing Manager for the Agency. Jess divides her time between overseeing client campaigns, assisting with the strategic approach, copywriting and ad design, delivering workshops to small and medium business owners and marketing teams, being a mum and relaxing on her Gympie property surrounded by birds, chickens, kangaroos and trees with a vino in hand. Get in touch with Jess here.
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