From the archive. First published in November 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
If you are new to running a Facebook page, the single most useful thing to understand is that reaching your own followers is not how pages work any more. Here is the beginner’s version, written for how the platform actually behaves now.
Two routes to being seen
- Connected reach. People who follow you. Ranked partly on whether they have interacted with you before. Typically between 0.5 and 4.4 percent of your followers see a given post, depending mostly on how large the page is.
- Recommended reach. People who do not follow you, shown your content because the system predicts they will like it. Roughly a third of organic feed views in the United States come this way.
The second route is where the opportunity is, and it has nothing to do with your follower count.
What to expect realistically
A page with 10,000 followers should expect a few hundred to a couple of thousand views on a typical post, single digit to low double digit comments, and a handful of shares. Engagement rate sits around 0.15 percent of followers, or about 5 percent of the people actually reached. If you see wildly different figures quoted, check whether they divide by followers or by reach, because that difference alone accounts for a factor of about thirty.
The four things that matter most
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Post regularly
Weekly or better, consistently. This is the best evidenced habit available.
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Use the formats that get distribution
Images for reach, Reels for recommendation, live video if you can manage it. Links reach about a sixth of what images do.
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Stay recommendable
No hashtag stuffing, no keyword stuffed captions, no reposting other people’s content without adding something. Each of those can cost you recommendation eligibility entirely.
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Reply to people
Past interaction is a ranking signal, and it is the cheapest goodwill available.
The detailed version, including which widely repeated tactics have no evidence behind them, is in our guide to organic reach.
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