Help! My Facebook page engagement is down since the Australian News ban.

Here in Australia, it seems that Facebook page engagement is down around 50% since the Facebook News Ban in Australia.

In the Community Manager group I am in, many community managers are pulling their hair out over it. The effect seems to be more severe for those pages who were caught up in it.

My theory

With a decent handful of pages having their content removed from peoples news feeds, this has caused two things to adjust:

• The users newsfeed. Without the user seeing their usual content, this has caused the user to interact with new content, giving new signals to Facebook on what they are now interested in and want to see more of.
• The audience of the page: When a page posts content, Facebook puts the post out to those who are most likely to like the content. Often this is a group of dedicated fans. If the content resonates positively with each audience, Facebook will keep serving the content until the engagement starts to drop. Also known as the \’Snowball Effect\’.

The Solution

The answer could very well be, we simply need to get our page audience seeing our posts again. But how do we do this?

We will have to pay.

For the next month, allocate $5-10 or more to amplify your posts back to your Facebook page followers. Alternate with a few posts unpaid and compare the organic reach and engagement.

This will get your followers seeing your content and interacting, giving Facebook positive signals that ‘this user wants to see more of this from this page’.

I hope this helps.