Facebook appears to be sending brands a clear message: The free lunch is over.
The average reach that brands get for posts on Facebook without putting money behind them has crashed by just shy of 50% since October, according to a study this week from Ogilvy based on 106 Facebook pages it has admin access to for brands around the world.
See also: Marketers Learn to Play by Facebook's Changing Rules
The decline is particularly striking for Facebook pages with more than 500,000 Likes. These larger brand pages saw their organic reach halved to just 2% in February. The study suggests organic reach for big and small brands will likely hit zero in the future, based on current trends as well as conversations with "Facebook sources."
"There is still value to organic reach and there will be for a few months to a year," Marshall Manson, a managing director at Ogilvy who authored the report, told Mashable. "The value is for testing."
Manson was inspired to put together the study after reading a number of reports about the impact that Facebook's tweak to the News Feed algorithm last year had on brand reach. He deliberately waited a couple months in order to get a better picture of the impact these changes had on reach in the months before and after.

"One of the most striking findings for me was the extent to which large pages started with a lower base of organic reach and then suffered the same size decline [as smaller pages]," he says. "The experience that large pages are having now really underscores the need... to step back and evaluate."
Facebook has framed its changes to News Feed in the past as being intended to improve the overall user experience, rather than being a means to pressure brands to make more ad buys. Still, a number of brands have expressed frustration with these changes.
"Is Facebook kind of tightening the screws on brands to support more of their activity with paid? Clearly the answer to that is yes," Manson says. Even so, he doesn't this to drive way brands
"I actually think brands will spend more," he says. "They want to drive engagement at scale and Facebook remains the best place to drive engagement with scale."
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