Is Facebook limiting the reach of Facebook posts to 7%?

ByCraig Haley

A long running rumour that causes plenty of confusion amongst Facebook users is the assertion that Facebook are limiting the reach of the posts you make – either from your timelines or page – to 7%.

Often these posts encourage users to interact with the – often by typing in YES – in order to “stay engaged” and to receive updates.

Posts like the one below are spreading around the social networking site urging users to comment on them in order to “allow you to see updates”.

post-reach

The problem with these posts is that they are not accurate, and are likely to encourage page owners looking for maximum reach to engage in some tactics that could potentially be detrimental to their overall page reach. Ultimately the rumours to a rather poor job at describing a complex situation.

For the majority of time that Facebook has been around, what you see (and don’t see) on your newsfeed when you log-in each day has been subject to a complex decision-making algorithm. This algorithm (formerly known as EdgeRank) takes in plenty of factors when deciding what you see when you visit Facebook, including [but not limited to] how often you interact with a particular page/person and how much interaction a particular post has accumulated.

Basically, because this algorithm filters what every user sees on their newsfeed, your posts do not – and have never – reached all of your follower’s newsfeeds. Sometimes they just get filtered out.

Facebook has – for some time – been reducing the reach of Facebook Pages in favour of both posts by friends and sponsored adverts. This means that posts made by Facebook pages may – on average – reach fewer followers. However, despite claims made in the above rumours, there is no fixed 7% reach, and the reach of each post will depend on many different factors, many of which are outside the control of the Page Admins. Some posts may get close to being seen by all followers, while others may be as close to 0% as you can get. Most, of course, will be somewhere in between.


Sponsored Content. Continued below...




The idea of typing “YES” on a post to help you see future posts made by a friend or page you follow works on the logic that since one of the factors that Facebook’s filtering algorithm looks for his your past interaction on posts made by a particular friend or page, then interacting with the word “YES” will improve your chances of seeing future posts.

However, this isn’t a viable long-term strategy, and artificially inflating interaction with your posts (i.e. asking them to comment) is likely to result in penalties. Specifically, limited reach. Facebook doesn’t look for meaningless one word comments when choosing what posts to show in your feed, it looks for genuine long-term interest and genuine interaction. Basically, simply typing “YES” (or whatever other word) doesn’t represent genuine interaction, and its effect is likely to be minimal.

Do you want to make sure you see the posts from your favourite people and pages? Then interact with the posts in an organic, genuine way to show Facebook you’re interested. There are also other methods to get more control over what you see on Facebook by reading our article here on regaining control over your newsfeed.

NOTE: These kind of rumours often get spurred on by confusion and misinterpretation. For example, in March 2015 Facebook announced that ‘inactive’ accounts were being removed from a Facebook Page’s Like count. This led to confusion over the meaning of ‘inactive’ with many admins assuming that users inactive with their Page would be removed, thus leading to many imploring their users to interact with a post in the manner described in the above image. In reality the term ‘inactive’ mean accounts that had been deactivated (i.e. deleted) by the user (or memorialized.)