From the archive. First published in December 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
After the 2013 reach changes, a steady stream of brands announced they were abandoning Facebook pages. Some said the platform was actively harming their business. The question we asked then is worth answering properly now, because the answer has changed.
What those brands were right about
A page is not a broadcast channel. If your plan was reaching your followers for free, that plan stopped working and is not coming back. Reach per follower sits at roughly 1.25 percent today and around 0.50 percent for pages above 100,000 followers.
What they got wrong
Leaving entirely was an overcorrection, and the reason is the thing that changed after they left.
Roughly a third of organic feed views in the United States now come from recommendations to people who do not follow the page. Metricool’s analysis of nearly 40 million posts found Facebook reach up 51 percent year on year, the largest gain of any platform it measured. Reach is recovering from a very low base, through video and recommendation rather than through the follower graph.
So a page today is not what it was in 2012, but it is also not the dead weight it was in 2018.
What a page is actually good for now
- A trust signal. People check whether a business exists and whether anyone is home.
- A support channel. People message pages rather than filling in contact forms, and good replies are publicly visible.
- An advertising foundation. You need a page to advertise, and an established one with genuine engagement performs better than a blank one.
- A discovery surface. Through Reels and recommendation, reaching people who have never heard of you.
The decision rule
Leave if your only use for the page is free link traffic, because that is gone by design. Stay if the page can feed something you own. And in either case, if the page has a genuine audience in a commercial niche and you are not going to use it, it is an asset sitting idle and may be worth more to someone else.
Thinking of selling?
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