With all this talk about Facebook changing the game with brand pages, I decided to do a little digging to see how this was affecting larger pages we manage which rely on organic reach (as opposed to paying for promoted posts).

I looked at 2 pages with over 50,000 likes for a 6 month period starting on April 1st. Both pages’ posting schedule is identical in frequency and days. Both pages rely on Facebook advertising to build their fan bases, but they rely solely on organic reach and engagement to get their content seen.

The numbers aren’t surprising, but I wanted to validate all of these claims of Facebook lowering the reach with actual numbers that are relevant to me (which I strongly encourage you to do for anything in your business).

As you can see, May, June, and July saw increased reach month over month, but then the negative trend starts in August. I hope it doesn’t get worse, or we’ll have to do a couple of things:

• Increase budget for Facebook marketing.
• Decrease investment in Facebook over time until other channels are driving the amount of traffic and conversions for these pages.

Here’s the kicker. Facebook is an extremely valuable channel for these two pages. In fact, it drives approximately 15%-20% of all conversions for these two companies.

I just hope that Facebook doesn’t force us to evaluate its effectiveness.

What do you think? Planning on making it work, or are you devising an exit strategy?