And here's why:
For a long time it was a goal for many businesses to be big on social media and have lots of followers. For some, that is still a dream. 10,000 followers may give a page status, but it certainly does not guarantee reach. Where the most popular kid in the class with the most friends used to actually get a lot of attention. That no longer applies to the most popular pages on social media. How to deal with this and why this might not be such a bad thing can be read in this blog.
In early 2018, Facebook already announced that it wants to limit the number of posts from businesses in users' timelines, but several studies from around the world show that organic reach has been declining since 2012. Back then you still reached 17% of your followers, in early 2018 it was just over 1% with luck.
For Instagram, until recently Facebook was still indicating that personal profiles do not take precedence over business profiles. Though now former CEO Kevin Systrom indicated years ago that people don't see 70% of the content posted by profiles they follow.
This summer, however, a quote from an advertiser on Instagram's blog revealed that Instagram is also limiting organic reach. The vice president of brand communications for clothing brand Old Navy indicated that they are noticing that organic reach of their once-popular content has dropped sharply. Remarkably, Instagram almost proudly highlights this on their own website, but it is not surprising considering that Instagram makes its money from ads.
Organic reach is also declining on LinkedIn. That was 20%, but in anno 2019 it is only 5% at most. Indeed, LinkedIn is also giving content from individuals a greater role, pushing content from companies off the timeline.
Advertising the solution?
If you want to be visible on social media, you really can't ignore advertising anymore. Given the policy of all major social media, you literally have to buy reach, while buying followers, which is still possible on Facebook, is actually a waste of money. This is because there is no guarantee that you will reach these people with your posts after this. You can therefore promote your posts to your followers. But the big advantage is that you can also promote your posts to a specific target group. For example, only men or people who live in a certain city. The budget and your objective then largely determine your reach.