(This article originally appeared on smallbizblog.com, which has since folded.)

If you’ve tended a Facebook business page for any length of time, it’s a fact that you’re probably quite aware of: organic reach on Facebook, to be blunt, sucks, and has been doing so for a while now. There are a number of things you can do to try and turn this around, but first  (for the uninitiated):

What Is Organic Reach?

Organic reach is defined as the number of users who see your content when they check out their newsfeed or your page. Think of organic reach as non-paid exposure, as opposed to paid reach, such as with advertising. It used to be that when people liked your page, a significant percentage of them, via their newsfeed, would see much of what you posted. This free exposure has been getting more and more scarce for a number of reasons (*cough* Facebook makes money off ads *cough*), to the point where it may seem that the only way to get exposure for your posts these days is to throw money at the problem in the form of post boosts (we’ll take a look at Facebook advertising in a future post).