Facebook? Don’t know her.
Everyone keeps declaring Facebook dead. I say they’re wrong.
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If someone forwarded this to you…
Search “Facebook organic reach” and you’ll find a pile of obituaries. They say that posting on Facebook is a waste of time, and the brand page is finished, so put the money into ads and walk away. The same verdict, agency after agency.
They’re not necessarily wrong about the part they’re looking at. They’ve just decided that a broken leg equates to death.
“Facebook” isn’t a single place you post to. It’s a handful of very different places, each with its own rules, and the people writing it off are judging all of them by the worst one.
Whenever something goes up on Facebook, two separate things are happening.
The first is who is doing the posting. There are two kinds of accounts. There’s your personal profile, which is you, a human, with friends. And there’s a Page, which is what you set up for a business, with your logo, a name, and a “follow” button instead of friends.
The second is what you’re posting and where it ends up. A normal post, a few words, a photo, a link, drops into the feed, which is the endless scroll people see when they open the app. A Reel is a short video, and Facebook treats videos as their own separate thing with their own rules. A Group is a different space again, it’s a room people join around a shared interest, with its own little feed inside it that also ends up on the main feed.
RIP Organic Reach
When someone says posting on Facebook doesn’t work, they nearly always mean this combo: a business, posting a normal update from its Page, into the feed, without paying.
That combination is the single worst-performing thing on the platform. By most estimates a business Page now reaches somewhere between 1 and 5% of the people who follow it. So if ten thousand people followed you, a couple of hundred might see any given post. The rest never know it went up, and remember, these are people who actively chose to hear from you.
So yes. If that’s your whole Facebook strategy, it’s dead, and the obituaries are right. The mistake is thinking that one combination is everything Facebook has to offer.
Its Death Wasn’t From Natural Causes
Facebook is a business, and it makes its money selling ads. Every time a company reaches its audience for free, that’s money Facebook didn’t make. Back in 2018 it changed the feed to favour posts from friends and family over posts from businesses, and it has tightened that ever since. So a Page’s free reach got strangled, and the reach you used to get for nothing is now something you rent through ads.
The Page didn’t break. It works exactly the way Facebook needs it to. Pay for the reach you want.
So What is the Page Even for?
Think of your Page like a shopfront, the place someone goes to when they’ve heard your name and wants to check you’re real before they trust you. So set it up like that: a clear photo, one line that says what you do, a pinned post showing your best proof. People will come to it when they’re already curious. What it won’t do is go out and find new people for you, so pouring hours into Page posts and waiting for them to spread is time you’ll never get back.
The reach you’re after lives elsewhere. Here’s where.
What Travels?
Facebook has two ways of putting your stuff in front of people. It can show it to the people who already follow you, or it can recommend it to strangers it thinks will like it. Which of those you get depends almost entirely on the format you posted in.
A normal feed post — a photo, a meme, a few lines of text, a link — goes out to a slice of your existing followers first. For it to reach anyone new, one of those followers has to share it on. Facebook won’t carry it out to strangers by itself.
A Reel works the opposite way round. Facebook shows it to people who don’t follow you first, almost as a test, before it even bothers your own followers. That’s why a Reel can take off from a standing start while the exact same idea posted as a photo just sits there waiting for someone to pass it along.
Both of those can be posted by the same Page. A Reel from your Page and a status update from your Page are both “the business posting,” yet they reach completely different numbers of people, purely because of the format. So if you ever wondered whether a meme posted from your Page would travel — a good video can find new people on its own, while a good meme mostly waits to be shared by the few who already saw it.
Where Reach Lives Now
Three places.
Reels. The short-video format, and the main way strangers find you on Facebook now, because it’s the one thing the platform actively pushes to people who don’t follow you. One catch worth knowing: make the video for Facebook rather than obviously lifting it off TikTok with the watermark still on, because the recycled stuff tends to get far less reach.
Groups. The community rooms people join around a shared interest. A post inside an active group reaches far more of its members than a Page post reaches of its followers — the figures that get quoted are something like 20 to 40% for groups against that 1 to 5% for Pages. There are two very different ways to use them. The first is your own group, which you create and run, where you’ve got full control and that higher reach — for a brand, that’s the real prize. The second is other people’s groups, where you’re a guest. A business can technically join a group as its Page, but plenty of group owners block that, because a logo turning up in a community reads as an advert. So in someone else’s group, it’s best to show up as a person, not the brand.
Your own profile. A real human’s profile reaches further than a business Page, and people trust it more. For a founder that’s almost unfair in your favour — the best distribution you’ve got might be your own account, sitting there posting nothing useful. You don’t have to make yourself the face of everything, but a founder who shows up as themselves gets seen in places the logo gets ignored.
Don’t Just Broadcast
You don’t only have to post your own things and hope they reach the right people. You can join conversations that are already busy.
A comment on someone else’s popular post can put you in front of their whole audience, and that often does more for you than a post on your own Page would. On your own posts, replying quickly matters too, when a post gets a flurry of real comments soon after it goes up, Facebook reads that as a sign it’s worth showing to more people.
So, no…
Facebook isn’t dead. Everything that actually reaches people now lives in the formats and the rooms the obituary writers never check.
The harder question is what to actually do with all this when you’re starting from nothing. I’m currently writing a Facebook Playbook that you can implement for your own brand, dropping soon for paid subs.
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I run social media audits, full strategy engagements, and marketing advisory retainers.
If you want me to look at your specific situation, you can find the full details on the services I offer and how to get in touch here.