27 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
Why your Facebook page reach collapsed
Most Irish business pages reach a small fraction of their followers, and owners reasonably conclude the platform has stopped working. It has not, exactly — but what a page reaches for free and what it can reach for money are now two very different things, and treating them as one is where the money goes.
Followers were never an audience
A follower is somebody who once tapped a button. Facebook has spent a decade deciding that a feed full of business posts is worse than a feed full of friends and video, and it shows business pages to fewer of their own followers every year.
That is not going to reverse. A page with three thousand followers reaching sixty of them is normal, not broken.
What still gets organic reach
Things people respond to rather than scroll past: before-and-afters, a genuine local story, something being built or finished, a face, and anything people tag each other in.
Links out of the platform and plain promotional posts get the least. That is not a conspiracy, it is what the feed is optimised for.
- Before-and-after photographs of real work
- Short video of something being done, filmed on a phone
- A named local job people recognise
- Anything that makes somebody tag a friend
- Replying in the comments, which extends reach further than the post
Boosting is not advertising
The Boost button spends money to show a post to more people. It is not the same as a campaign with an objective, an audience and a lead form, and it optimises for engagement rather than for enquiries.
Boosted posts produce likes. Properly built campaigns produce enquiries. A great deal of Irish small business ad spend goes into the first while the owner wonders where the second is.
The practical version
Post because it keeps the page looking alive for the people who check you out before ringing. That is a real job and it is worth doing.
Run actual campaigns when you want enquiries. Expect the page itself to reach very few people for free, and stop measuring your marketing by it.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.