Have you ever notice some strangers started to engage in the post within organic reach, no ad at all?

If you experience once, well, the chances are, Facebook is suggesting your page to an irrelevant audience. And here is why you should be aware of it.

Today I just went over some posts on my facebook page to see the engagement rate. It was surprisingly high compared to the normal rate of my page. So out of curiosity, I clicked to see the people who engaged and I saw a list of all not-my-fan with the invite buttons. 

And I started to wonder, why was that? Why are a lot of strangers engaging with my post while I’m not running FB ads?

I came up with some theories that those are people who followed my page but didn’t “like” it. Or maybe the audience expansion feature from the ads manager attracted a new audience to the page. But it’s just so many people. the normal percentage should not be that high.

I searched on Google for “strangers interacting with my page”, “strangers organic reach”, “organic reach to not my fan”,… but there was not an article about it.

So I went further to stalk those profiles. I found something interesting:

1. They are from the age of around 15 to 18. They have nothing to do with my target audience, which is 25 and above. I never ran any ads which target to people under 25 years old.
2. Those are newly created profiles, just within a month and less than 100 friends (mostly 5-20). They did not have a username, their profile URL just stick with an ugly user id like this: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=10001294349202×0
3. They haven’t updated their profiles. Specifically, their info is empty. No contact, no likes, no music, no books, no work, no education. It’s just empty.

So that was definitely not because of the audience expansion. The audience expansion is supposed to reach more people who are similar to my existing audience. It made no sense to say that those newly created profiles have had a long history of online purchasing behavior and will be likely to make a purchase (with what? they’re only 15!!!).

So I came up with another theory. Facebook auto-suggested our page to those people without me noticing. So I took one step further to create a fresh account and see what’s there in my news feed. I got a long feed of this:

Tadaa!!!

No ads, just pure organic suggestions. I guess facebook borrows my page content just to fill up the blank newsfeed of newly created users in order to lure them to engage more and stick with the site longer.

I was afraid those profiles will ruin my audience, I tried to find a way to stop this. But the only thing I could do was to turn off Similar Page Suggestion option from my page setting. Let’s see how it goes. I will update it here in the next few days.