For most small business owners, having a Facebook presence is a non-negotiable requirement. Their customers are on Facebook every single day, making it the ideal place for brands to connect. But there’s a big problem: a significant portion of the posts you make to Facebook may never be seen by your customers at all.

Here’s why: money.

Facebook is a business, just like you; they want to be paid for giving you access to their users. For this reason, they manipulate the complex, secret algorithm they use to determine what posts users see in their news feeds to reduce the number of people who see the content you post to your business page. To determine how many people are seeing the content you post to your business Facebook page, you want to go to your Insights tab. There, you’ll be able to see how many people have seen your content (Reach) and engaged with it (Likes, Comments & Shares).

If these numbers aren’t as high as you’d like them to be, Facebook gives you two ways to remedy the problem. You can pay to boost a post, guaranteeing that it will be seen by a certain number of people, or you can choose to buy Facebook advertising. Choosing which strategy will work best for you can be determined on a case by case basis: most businesses that are successful at marketing themselves on Facebook use a combination of promoted posts and display advertising.

What you can’t do, if you want Facebook to be a viable marketing vehicle for you, is to rely upon organic reach alone. It doesn’t matter how great your content is: if nobody sees it, it’s not helping you build your business. Think of it like you were posting billboards – if all your signage is on a dead end street nobody visits, what value are you getting from your investment?

Facebook is a pay-for-play platform. As business owners, we need to acknowledge that reality, create an advertising budget, and use that to increase the number and quality of engagements we’re getting. Need help making this happen? Give us a call. We’ll make sure your advertising gets you the attention you’ve been looking for!