What am I getting for free?
Most businesses have these pages already. Someone set them up years ago, posts land on them every few weeks, and nobody can say whether it is worth the effort. The honest answer is that it is worth the effort, but almost never for the reason it gets sold: the pages are not a distribution channel any more. They are a credibility check.
Here is what actually happens when a stranger hears about you. They look you up, they land on your page, and in about four seconds they decide whether you are a real business that is still trading. Recent posts, real photographs, replies to comments and correct opening hours answer that question. An abandoned page answers it too, just badly.
Treat the page as a shop window that people check before buying, not as a billboard that finds them. That one change of expectation makes the numbers below much easier to read.
How a post reaches anyone
Meta does not show your post to your followers. It shows it to a fraction of them, watches what that fraction does, and decides from their reaction whether to show it to anyone else. Understanding that loop explains every strange number in Insights.
You publish
A post
photo, video, reel or story
Meta tests it
On a sample
a small share of followers see it first
Their reaction decides
How far it goes
saves, shares and comments buy more reach
Organic, what this guide covers
Free. Reach is small, unpredictable, and earned by how people react. Typical unpaid reach is a single-digit percentage of your followers.
Paid, a different platform
Buying reach the post would never have earned is Meta Ads. Same content, entirely different economics and controls.
This is also why saves and shares matter far more than likes. A like costs a viewer nothing and tells Meta almost nothing. A share puts your post in front of an audience you do not own, which is the only way an unpaid post ever reaches a stranger.
The four numbers worth reading
Insights will show you dozens. These four answer the question the others decorate.
How many people actually saw it?
Reach, not followers. This is the only honest measure of how far a post travelled.
A page with 2,400 followers reaching 180 people per post is completely ordinary.Insights · per postDid the post earn its reach?
Engagement rate on reach, not on followers. Compare your posts against each other, never against a published benchmark.
12 interactions from 180 reached is about 6.7%, which is healthy.Insights · per postDid it bring anyone new?
Profile visits and new follows. The bridge between a post being seen and a person becoming an audience.
Reach of 180 with 14 profile visits means the post made people curious.Insights · overviewDid anyone come to my site?
Link clicks and action-button taps. The only one of the four that shows up in Google Analytics.
Small numbers here are normal: social sends few visits but warm ones.Insights · overviewJudge a post against your other posts, never against someone else's benchmark. Reach depends on your followers, your format and the week.
Setting it up properly
Five steps, once, and then a rhythm you can actually keep.
- 1Complete the page as though a customer will read it
Address or service area, phone number, opening hours including public holidays, and a description that says what you do in one sentence. This is the part that gets read, and it is the part most often out of date.
15 min - 2Connect Instagram to the Facebook page
Link both to a Meta Business account that your business owns, not an employee's personal login and not an agency's. If you ever part ways with whoever set it up, this is the step that decides whether you keep your own audience.
10 min - 3Add the action button people need
Call, Book, Message or a link to the page that takes enquiries. One button, matching the thing you most want a visitor to do, and tested on a phone.
5 min - 4Pick a rhythm you can sustain for a year
One good post a week beats five in a burst and then silence for a month. The page is being read as evidence that you are trading, and an eight-week gap is the only signal a visitor needs.
10 min - 5Read Insights once a month, not once a day
Look at reach and saves across the month's posts, find the two that outperformed, and make more of those. Daily checking tells you nothing except which day you posted.
5 min
Three things beginners misread
The wrong read
"We have 2,400 followers, so 2,400 people see what we post."
The right read
"We have 2,400 followers and reach about 180 of them. The follower count is history; reach is the audience."
Misread one
Followers are not an audience
A follower count records everyone who ever tapped follow, including people who have not opened the app in three years. Meta does not push your post to that list; it offers the post to a sample and expands from there.
Which means buying followers, or running a giveaway to win them, makes the number go up and the reach go down, because the new followers do not react and Meta reads that as a weak post.
The wrong read
"That post got 18% engagement. Our best ever."
The right read
"It reached 11 people and two of them tapped something. That is a rate, not a result."
Misread two
A rate on a tiny reach is noise
Engagement rate divides interactions by reach, so when reach is small the rate swings wildly for reasons that have nothing to do with the post. One loyal customer commenting can double it.
Below roughly a hundred people reached, read the raw counts instead: how many saves, how many shares, how many profile visits. Those are small numbers, but they are real ones.
The wrong read
"Our reach has halved in two years. We have lost our touch."
The right read
"Unpaid reach has fallen everywhere for a decade. The page's job changed; ours is to keep it credible."
Misread three
Falling organic reach is the weather, not your fault
Meta has spent years giving feed space to content people choose rather than pages they once followed, and to formats it is currently pushing. Every business page has felt it.
The useful response is not to post more often into the same headwind. It is to accept that the page earns trust and the ads buy reach, and to budget accordingly. A business relying on unpaid social for new customers is relying on something that has been shrinking since before it started.
In Clearly
Facebook and Instagram pages are connectable in Clearly today. You link your Meta account once, choose the page and the Instagram profile, and the report reads reach, engagement, follower change and link clicks alongside everything else, on the same date range and the same comparison as the rest of your marketing.
The reason to have it in the same report rather than in the app is the question the app cannot answer: when your paid campaigns ran, did your unpaid reach move with them? Meta Ads, your page, and the website visits that followed all sit on one page, which turns "the socials are ticking along" into something with a number attached.
Cheat sheet
| Number | What it is | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Followers | Everyone who ever followed the page | A historical total. Watch the change, not the level |
| Reach | Distinct people who saw a post at least once | The real audience size for that post |
| Impressions | Every time a post appeared, including repeats | Always higher than reach; use reach instead |
| Engagement | Reactions, comments, shares and saves | Saves and shares carry the most weight |
| Engagement rate | Engagement divided by reach | Meaningless below about a hundred reached |
| Profile visits | People who opened your page after seeing a post | The bridge from seen to interested |
| Link clicks | Taps on your bio link, button or post link | The only number that also appears in Analytics |
Common questions
Do I need a Facebook page to advertise on Instagram?
Yes. Instagram advertising runs through a Meta Business account that includes a Facebook page, even if you never post to it. Since you have to have one, it is worth the forty minutes to make it complete and current rather than leaving an empty shell for customers to find.
How often should I post?
Weekly, if you can hold it for a year. Consistency matters more than frequency because the page is being read as evidence that you are still trading. If weekly is not realistic, fortnightly and honest beats daily for a month and then nothing.
Why has my reach dropped even though I post more?
Unpaid reach has been falling across every business page for years, and posting more into that headwind does not reverse it. Check whether your saves and shares have fallen too. If they have, the content is the problem. If they have not, the platform is, and the answer is paid reach rather than more posts.
Should I boost a post or build a proper campaign?
Boost when a post is already performing unusually well organically and you simply want more of the same audience. Build a campaign when you have an actual objective, such as enquiries. Boosting is the fastest way to spend money on reach with no conversion tracking behind it, which is covered in the Meta Ads guide.
Facebook or Instagram, if I only have time for one?
Go where your customers already are rather than where you prefer to be. Instagram suits anything visual and a younger audience; Facebook still carries local community groups, events and an older demographic, which matters a great deal for trades and hospitality. Posting the same thing to both takes almost no extra time, so "one" is usually a false choice.
Where to go next
Open your page as a stranger would, on a phone, and read the first screen. Correct hours, a phone number that works, a recent post and a photograph of the real place will do more for you this month than any posting schedule. Then look at last month's posts sorted by reach, find the two that travelled furthest, and work out what they had in common. That is your content strategy, and it came from your own data rather than an article.
The series
All nine Platform 101s, in setup order
What each platform does, what it costs, how to set it up, and what its numbers mean.