Facebook will (finally) shift to viewable-only organic reach counts for Pages next year

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More than a year ago, Facebook said it would change how it counts organic reach for Pages’ posts to only include viewable impressions. But that adjustment has not been made yet.

Facebook expects to institute the new methodology — which will only count organic reach when a Page’s post appeared on a person’s screen — in early 2018, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

When the company announced in November 2016 that it would shift to only counting viewable impressions for Pages’ organic posts’ reach counts as it does for ads, Facebook said the change would take effect “in the coming months.” However, the solution has taken longer than expected to build, said the spokesperson.

The news that Facebook has yet to switch to viewable-only organic reach counts may surprise some brands and other Page owners who likely assumed that Facebook had already adopted the viewability standard. Though not done yet — for obvious reasons — Facebook did say it would alert Pages once the change was actually implemented.

It may have surprised Page owners not to have seen the 20 percent drop in organic reach that Facebook advised them to anticipate after the fix was to be enacted. And then again, at this point, any level of organic reach may surprise Page owners, considering Facebook’s continued algorithm changes that make organic reach more difficult to come by on its platform.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.