Hi Jesse,
I'm sure I'm not the only 'Refresher who feels your pain.
Organic reach on Business Page Facebook Posts has trickled down to single digit numbers.
Most experts in this field are predicting that organic FB reach will dwindle to near 0-2% levels in the coming months, literally forcing business owners to pay if they want their content to be seen by the masses.
Gigaom has a nice article covering the details of this. Definitely worth checking out.
So does that mean you should "boost" every single update? Absolutely not.
Let's face it, we're not always posting golden content on Facebook. Like a baseball player, we miss our audience more often than we get a hit. So let's look in to mirror before we start blaming ever-changing algorithms.
Personally, I won't boost a post unless it already has some organic engagement. 7-10 likes and a comment or two signal to me that this piece of content is hitting the mark, so it's worth boosting if there's a good reason for it.
What I don't recommend doing is propping up a poor performing post with boosted engagement. If you publish something and after an hour you don't have any engagement, chalk it up to a learning experience, but don't spend any money on it.
But fear not, organic engagement isn't dead just yet. You can still get fantastic organic engagement if you post targeted, relevant content to your audience.
For example, take this picture I posted last month for on the
FB Page of LaFontaine Cadillac Buick GMC (2,288 page likes)
The post reached 4,600+ people organically - twice the audience of the FB page itself.
A few factors that helped out this post was that I tagged everybody who was in that pic that I was FB friends with. Also, because it was a proud moment, the employees themselves were more engaged with the content than usual.
With that foundation, each like, comment and share built the momentum for this piece of content naturally. After it had over 150+ likes, I threw a few dollars behind it to help spread the word, but you'll notice that I only reached an extra 1,000 people.
Going forward with Social Media in general and Facebook specifically if you want your posts to be seen organically, it's imperative to remember that you're creating content for real people with real needs, wants, problems and desires.
Figure out what they want to see, and you'll still get your fair share of organic engagement.