Case study · Social media·Ecommerce
Thirty thousand followers, and 51 clicks in four months.
This page was not empty. It had 30,900 followers. Across four full months it reached 8,294 people, down 99.1% on the period before. The followers were there. The platform was not delivering anything to them.
7,000
link clicks
was 51
What we found
The number we looked at was not reach
The first thing anyone looks at is reach: 8,294. But the number carrying the story is 51 clicks in four months. The page was not only failing to reach people, what it did reach was doing nothing. And opening the breakdown showed organic reach of 2,161: out of 30,900 followers, fewer than three thousand saw anything at all in four months.
The ratio
2,161 organic reach against 30,900 followers
Across four months. Nine in ten followers saw nothing the page published.
Followers are not a distribution channel
Platforms distribute by interest now, not by follower list. A page publishing things nobody engages with gets shown less and less, even to the people who chose to follow it. The follower count stays on the dashboard doing nothing.
The number that collapses first
Engagement. Seventy interactions in four months means the platform has no reason to show that content to anyone new. Reach falls after engagement, not before it, so anyone watching reach alone notices the problem late.
And why ads alone would not have covered it
There was ad spend before we took it on: 6,030 paid reach across the four months, down 99.3%. The money was going out and the result was 51 clicks. An ad buys reach. It does not buy a reason for anyone to stop.
The work
What changed between the two boards
Engagement moved first, organic reach after it, and spend came last. That order is not a detail, it is what makes the spend produce anything.
What we did
- Interactions from 70 to 5,700, which is the signal platforms distribute on
- Organic reach multiplied eight times: from 2,161 to 18,371, with no money behind it
- Directed spend at the content that had already proven itself, rather than spreading it across every post
- Clicks from 51 to 7,000, which is the number the work is actually judged on
What we refused
- We did not buy followers or engagement, which lowers the engagement rate and shrinks distribution further
- We did not promise figures like these without ad spend, because that is not what happened
- We did not present the 709,000 as an achievement without saying most of it was paid
- We did not put followers forward as a measure of success, and they quadrupled
The boards, before and after
The images come straight from Meta Business Suite. The page name is withheld by agreement with the client and everything else is untouched. The organic and paid split is visible in both images, and we read it out loud rather than walking past it.
- Link clicks
- 517,000
- Organic reach
- 2,16118,371
- Content interactions
- 705,700
- Total reach
- 8,294709,739
January to April 2024: reach 8,294 (down 99.1%) · interactions 70 · clicks 51 · followers 30.9K
May to 15 August 2024: reach 709,739, of which 698,866 paid and 18,371 organic · clicks 7,000
Source: Meta Business Suite
Run it on your own page
How to tell who your page is actually reaching
These three take five minutes inside Meta Business Suite.
01
Open the reach breakdown
Reach splits into organic and paid. If someone shows you a single reach figure without that split, ask for it. The headline number can be entirely bought.
02
Divide organic reach by your follower count
Take organic reach over the last three months and divide it by your followers. If the result is under a tenth, your followers are not seeing you, and adding more of them changes nothing.
03
Ask about clicks, not reach
Reach can be bought. A click means somebody decided to do something. If clicks stay flat while reach climbs, you are paying to be seen rather than to sell.
If those numbers come back healthy, your problem is not social, and we will tell you so on the first call.
Things worth saying plainly
- Most of that reach was paid. Of 709,739, some 698,866 came from ads. The figure is printed in the screenshot itself, and we write it here so nobody reads the large number the wrong way.
- Organic did move, at a far smaller scale: from 2,161 to 18,371. That is the part nobody bought, and the part that survives if the spend stops.
- Followers went from 30,900 to 129,100, and that is not a number we measure by. It is here because it is in the image, not because it matters.
- Reach at this level needs continuous spend. Stop the ads and the figure falls. What stays is the organic reach and the clicks that came from it.
- The page name is withheld by agreement with the client, not by our choice.
Who this case resembles
If you find yourself in the first column, this story is about you.
- You have followers and reach has almost stopped
- You are spending on ads and cannot see the result
- Engagement on your posts is close to zero
- The page went quiet for a while and needs to work again
- You want figures like these with no ad spend at all
- You need followers as a number in their own right
- You are prepared to spend for one month and judge from that
Next step
Who is your page actually reaching?
Send us the page name and we will look at the reach breakdown and engagement over the last 90 days, and tell you whether the problem is the content, the distribution, or both.
Your details come to us and nobody else. We do not sell them or add you to a mailing list.
