10 Strategies to Boost Your Facebook Organic Reach
When Facebook business pages have just started, business pages were able to expect their page posts to reach its audience all the time - which it pretty much did. However, organic page reach is getting more and more difficult to manage.In 2014, Facebook Business released an update to news feed after surveying its users about what they would like to see on Facebook. The results revealed that most Facebook users want to see more updates and stories from their friends and pages they care about, and not so much for promotional content which some pages post way too often.
As such, pages posting promotional content as its focus - prompting users to purchase products, to install apps, to enter promotions without other relevant content, or even posts that reuse the exact same content from their ads, will see a decline in their organic reach.
2 years later, another update follows in a similar fashion, but this time, to reduce the organic reach of pages frequently posting clickbait content, so basically…
How Facebook Algorithm Works
Even with all these algorithms in place, you don’t need to worry if you follow certain Facebook page guidelines and best practices! Facebook algorithms will benefit pages that are engaging and highly interactive - in a positive manner, of course.If you are in Facebook groups, as an example, you might notice that posts with high engagements - comments, likes, etc., are shown on your news feed first. Posts with zero interactions rarely show up unless you are browsing the group page itself!
The same concept applies to Facebook pages - the higher the user interactions, the better favorability you have with Facebook’s complex algorithms. This enables your page contents to be shown to your users more often!
Here’s how Adam Mosseri, the VP of News Feed at Facebook explains algorithm and how it affects whether or not your Facebook posts show up on someone else’s news feed.
An algorithm is likened to a formula or a series of steps that solves a particular problem. In this case, there are 4 steps being considered, which Adam explained in the context of choosing what to order for his wife in a restaurant. He summarized the algorithm in these 4 simple points below:
- Inventory: Here, Adam checks the available options.
- Signals: Adam considers the best dishes in the restaurant, and whether it’s lunch or dinner time, along with that he knows his wife likes to eat.
- Predictions: Adam would make simple predictions in his head, such as, “Would it be weird if I ordered her a chocolate souffle for breakfast? How about having salmon for lunch today?”
- Score: With all the options considered, Adam places an informed order for his wife.
Your posts are like the inventories - there are plenty other posts available from a Facebook user’s friends and other pages they follow.
Facebook also takes into consideration signals such as the number of engagements a page post already has, how often the person or publisher posts, previous negative feedbacks on a person’s post and many other factors.
Of course, whether or not the post type is something that the Facebook user usually interacts with is also taken into consideration. The posts available to be shown to you each time you scroll Facebook will be scored with the signals provided, before a post is eventually chosen to be shown to you or your clients.
1. Post for Interaction, Not for Sales
How Facebook algorithms work is exactly why you need to produce more content that encourages user interactions. We know, you have a Facebook page so that you can sell, sell, sell and get profits to go along with your company’s KPIs.However, it’s important to remember that without something to reel your customers in first, you are unlikely to achieve what you set out to do. Take Gary Vaynerchuk’s business philosophy and strategy - Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.
The jabs refer to the high quality content you provide your followers - something they would appreciate. The right hook? That’s the ask; the ‘purchase now’ link, the subscribe prompt and so on. You might not land the right hook, but you have now earned the rights to try and land it - the rights to ask for the end goal - the sale. Quoting Gary Vaynerchuk, “You gotta throw some jabs before you throw your right hook.”
2. Post When It Counts with Your Own Data
If you have just started your Facebook page, it’s unlikely that you can find the optimal time to post immediately. You can try posting different types of content at different times of the day consistently for a few weeks first.Afterwards, you can head to the Facebook page insights to see how well your page posts fare when posted in different formats at different times of the day. You can find your Facebook page insights by going into settings, and then the insights tab at the top.
By entering Insights > Posts (Left Sidebar) > When Your Fans are Online, you can scroll over each day to see what time your users are mostly online, and schedule your posts to be published at that hour.
From our page insights, the best day and time to reach our users would be on 11AM and 1PM on Fridays, where the peaks are the highest.
Why not try exploring the Facebook Page Insights for your own business page and find out what information is ready for you so far?
3. Post Your Users’ Preferred Format & Content
Again, you will need to test with several posts over a few weeks or a few months (depending on your posting frequency & quality of content) before you can decide the type of content that your audience likes best.Let’s take for example our own business page.
After posting in several formats over the past few months, here’s what our Facebook page insights tell us about the type of post that has the most engagements.
Not too surprisingly, the video format gained the most traction among our page followers. The amount of reach and engagements has an increase of over 10x as compared to link, photo or status updates!
Of course, we were curious to see which post was the main contributor to this amount of reach and engagements.
Again, not too surprisingly, it was a giveaway post.
Reaching over 9.6K users, resulting in 1.1K clicks and 851 post reactions, comments or shares, our giveaway post features only a simple GIF with our logo on it.
It prompted our users to pause the video or GIF at the right moment and post the screenshot in the comment section with our hashtag #trinityangpao and to tag 3 of their friends. Additionally, they also have to like our page and share the post to even be qualified to win the red packets from us!
Even with these requirements, there were still plenty of engagements and participants for this giveaway.
So, we know that our audience interacts more with giveaway posts - especially posts with interactive content like this type of video.
A simple picture, status or link might not suffice, something we concluded when we experimented with our #Refer4Bonus incentive post that we shared with a blog post link detailing how to get a RM3,300 just by referring a friend or family member to work in our company.
4. Keep Competitors Close
If you know your direct competitors and their Facebook pages on Facebook, you already have a good advantage with Facebook Insights tool.Under Settings > Insights (Top Nav Bar) > Overview (Left Sidebar), just below the Page Summary and Your 5 Most Recent Posts sections, you will find a handy little tool called ‘Pages to Watch’.
Here, you will find the table populated with pages similar to yours along with a brief overview of how these pages are doing in terms of total page likes, increment from past week, the number of posts they have posted this week, and the number of post engagements they have had this week.
In the layout above, we have not added any pages to watch, but you can click on the ‘Add Pages’ button and find your direct competitors to observe how they are faring compared to your business.
If you see a sudden hike in their page likes or post engagements, you can then head over and see what’s working well for them and take that into reference!
5. Post with Audience Insights in Mind
If you remember us mentioning Audience Insights tool in our previous posts, here’s where you can utilize it again. At this page, you can choose to view insights for users connected to your page at the bottom of the left sidebar.Once you have enough users on your page, you will see data on the page’s users - what are their demographics, their location, their top page likes and many other details as previously discussed.
As an example, here’s a glimpse of what we see when we connect our Audience Insights Tool to one of our pages, Alibaba.com Malaysia Channel Partner - PanPages TRINITY.
With this information, you can focus on certain audience groups for giveaways, hold workshops that would align with their interests, and many more.
Knowing that most of our users connected to this page are university graduates, for example, we know that we can post job openings applicable for university fresh graduates with or without boosting the post for wider reach instead of jobs with postgraduate requirements.
6. Don’t be Scared to Share
You might think that you are recommending your page audience to other similar pages or businesses when you share their posts, but that is not the case!Take for example Elite Daily which shares mostly their own articles from their online news platform. From time to time, you’d see them sharing articles from other similar pages that targets a similar group of audiences - millennials.
Does sharing Bustle UK’s post means that their current Facebook fans are moving entirely to that new page instead? Nope. Sharing valuable content from other sources can be a great way to provide value to your followers, so don’t be afraid to share and continue providing quality content!
7. Provide Value - Even When You’re Not Around
If you have enabled the messaging function on your page - you really should if you haven’t, there’s much more that you can do with your pre-set messages than instant replies and welcoming messages.Take for example Chatfuel, a freemium chatbot system that allows users to get some information on the common FAQs that we have on our page.
Recently, our Facebook page has tested this chatbot feature to see what it could do, and we were pretty impressed by how easy it was to compute and implement. It might take some time to get it set up right with all sorts of questions and answers that will be helpful to your prospects, but the result of being able to provide the information they want the very instant they ask for it will be worthwhile.
8. Schedule Posts Ahead of Time
On some days, we would just be flowing with inspirations and ideas of what to post on our Facebook page. Don’t be hasty though!There is always a post-scheduling function that you can use when you are drafting a post on your page.
When you click the ‘schedule’ button, you can pick a date and time for your post to be published. In the meantime, it will stay as a draft in your page, unseen by the public audience!
This handy little tool is super useful when it comes to scheduling your upcoming promotions or other informative posts while you are away, Remember to schedule your posts to be published at your page’s peak engagement time!
9. Have a Social Media Content Calendar
Scheduling your posts to be published in a timely manner is always a good practice, but have you been planning about the type of content to post? Creating a social media content calendar will be good for this purpose.
Basically, a content calendar is a spreadsheet where you slot in certain posts on a certain day or throughout a week.
As an example, you can create a ‘Did You Know?’ post to be published on 9AM every Thursday, or remind your audience about why they should sign up for your upcoming workshop every 4 days in the month leading up to said event.
10. Continue to Track & Analyze
When all the posts have been scheduled and published, you should still look back at how your posts and content types are doing.Check your audience insights and page insights every now and then to ensure that your posted content are always relevant to your audience!
As a general guideline, the number of positive or negative interactions and the number of post engagements can be a good gauge of how good your content are to your page audience.
So, do you own a Facebook page? What are some of the strategies that has worked in your favor when it comes to post engagements so far? Let us know!
Enjoyed reading this post? This is part 4 of our 5-part Facebook guide.
