Facebook does not publish an algorithm changelog, and anyone claiming precise knowledge of the ranking weights is guessing. What is observable is the direction, and the direction has been stable long enough to plan around.
Here is what agencies managing local business pages should understand, stated at the confidence level the evidence supports.
The direction
Recommended content keeps expanding. A growing share of the feed comes from accounts the user does not follow, surfaced because the system predicts interest. For local business pages, this cuts both ways: your existing followers see you less, and you have a route to reach people who never followed you.
Video is weighted heavily, especially short vertical video. Reels-format content consistently reaches further than static images on comparable pages. This is not new and shows no sign of reversing.
Meaningful interaction outranks passive engagement. Comments and shares carry more weight than likes. Comment threads with back-and-forth replies carry more still.
Outbound links are suppressed. Posts driving traffic off-platform reach less than posts that keep the user on Facebook. This has been true for years and has tightened.
Organic page reach for local business remains low. Depending on page size and engagement history, somewhere in the low single digits as a percentage of followers is typical. Any strategy that assumes you reach your follower base organically is built on a false premise.
What this means practically
Stop treating follower count as the goal. Reporting that leads with follower growth is reporting on a metric that no longer predicts reach. Lead with reach, engagement rate, and actions taken.
Produce vertical video, even simple video. This is the highest-leverage change most local businesses can make and the one they resist most. It does not require production quality. A contractor filming thirty seconds of a finished job on a phone outperforms a designed graphic reliably.
The agency's job here is removing friction. Give the client a standing request: three short clips a week, shot vertically, no editing needed. Then you edit, caption, and schedule. Clients who will not shoot video need a different conversation about expectations.
Design for comments, not likes. Ask a question the audience has an opinion about. "Which color did we end up going with?" outperforms "Check out this project." Then have the client reply to every comment, ideally within the hour — reply threads extend the post's life.
Keep links out of the primary post. Put the link in the first comment, or use the post to build interest and rely on profile clicks. If a link is essential, accept the reach cost knowingly.
Post consistently. Irregular posting appears to depress reach beyond the missed posts themselves. Three a week reliably beats seven then none.
What still works and is underused
Local specificity. Neighborhood names, landmarks, local events, weather references. Facebook's recommendation system has strong geographic signals, and specific local references appear to help content surface to nearby non-followers.
Faces and named people. Content featuring identifiable people from the business consistently outperforms product and premises shots for local service businesses. Introduce the team, show who did the work.
Genuine before-and-after. For any trade with a visible result, this remains the highest-performing content type available, generates comments naturally, and requires no creative skill.
Direct customer questions in the caption. Not engagement bait, which is penalized. An actual question relevant to the post.
What to stop doing
Engagement bait. "Tag a friend who needs this," "comment YES if you agree." Detected and demoted.
Cross-posting Instagram content unmodified. Visible Instagram watermarks and format mismatches perform worse. Export the source file and post natively.
Purely promotional runs. Several consecutive sales posts trains the audience to scroll past and appears to accumulate negative signal. Roughly one promotional post in four is a workable ratio.
Sharing links to the client's blog and expecting reach. It will not reach. If the blog matters, drive it through email and search instead, and use Facebook for content that stays on Facebook.
The honest conversation with clients
At some point a client asks why their reach dropped. The answer is that organic reach for business pages has been declining for a decade by design, and this is a platform business model rather than a page problem.
What you can control: content format, consistency, comment activity, and local specificity. What you cannot control: how much organic distribution Meta grants business pages.
If reach genuinely matters to their business outcomes, the answer is a modest paid budget. Fifteen dollars boosting a post that is already performing organically reaches more of the local audience than any amount of organic optimization. Agencies who avoid this conversation end up blamed for a platform decision.
A note on prediction
Anything specific said about Facebook's algorithm has a shelf life measured in months. The durable advice is structural: make video, generate real conversation, be specifically local, post consistently, and do not build a strategy that depends on free reach to followers.
Those held through the last several years of changes and are likely to hold through the next.