I recently answered a question on Quora asked by a community manager who is wondering why his organic Facebook likes are decreasing after running a Facebook ad campaign to increase his page likes.
In my answer I delved into why he would be seeing a decline in organic reach after a Facebook campaign. I also explained how he could verify this was the problem. I also talked about what he could do to fix declining Facebook organic reach after a campaign.
If you're having the same problem, you can follow these steps as well to figure out if you need to improve the targeting of your ads to fix your declining Facebook organic reach!
Why would Facebook organic reach decline after a campaign?
Another community manager asked a similar question about declining organic reach after a campaign, which hurt his page's organic reach for several weeks, during Facebook's "How News Feed Works" session at their F8 Developers Conference.
The answer was that poorly targeted ads were likely to cause a large increase in negative feedback (people hiding your ad, people choosing to hide all posts from your page from their feeds, un-liking your page from a post, or reporting your ad as spam).
An increase in negative feedback will hurt the likelihood that Facebook will feature any of your content organically in the News Feed, even to people who already like your page.
Why did organic reach decline in this community manager's case?
In his case what most likely happened is that he didn't target his ads well, and so he ended up with a lot of negative feedback on his ads.
Now his posts are likely to be appearing less often in the News Feed, which is hurting the page's organic growth as the existing fans are less likely to be sharing his posts and their friends are less likely to see those existing fans interacting with his posts in their newsfeeds.
How can you verify this is the cause of your declinining organic reach?
Be sure you're signed into the new Facebook Business Manager and visit your Facebook ad management page.
From there click the page likes campaign in question. Once you're on the campaign view, click the "View Report" button just below the large graph showing the overall results of your campaign.
From this report view, you'll want to click the "Customize Columns" button under the "Report Settings" section near the top of the page. This will open a small pop-up window.
On the default tab in this new pop-up (default tab is "Performance") you'll find the option to add the "Negative Feedback," "Positive Feedback," and "Relevance Score" metrics to your report. Be sure to check each and then click the big blue "Apply" button at the bottom of the pop-up.
You should also be sure that the "Level" button (just beside Customize Columns) is set to "ad." That's because these 3 metrics are only available at the ad level for each individual ad, you can't get them for an ad set or an entire ad campaign.
These metrics will tell you whether your negative and positive feedback were low, medium, or high. This rating will tell you whether the ad performed well, or if it wasn't very well-liked by the people who saw it. The relevance score is also useful. It rates your ad's relevance to the audience it was targeted at with a number between 1 and 10. Ads with a relevance score of 1 were targeted awfully and the target audience hated them, ads with a score of 5 did okay, but didn't stand out and may have gotten a good bit of negative feedback, and ads with a higher score or a perfect 10 were very well-targeted and resonated well with the target audience.
Checking out these campaign metrics should help you figure out whether poor ad targeting is the cause of your decreased organic reach following a Facebook ad campaign.
Have you seen a drop again in March in your Facebook Page's organic reach?
