Improving Your Facebook Organic Reach
Organic reach is your ability to reach people for free on social media sites through posts on your business page. Over the past couple of years, it has become increasingly difficult to develop a good amount of organic reach, especially on Facebook. This guide will help you combat the decline in organic reach so that you can improve communication with your followers.
The Decline in Facebook Organic Reach
There are several reasons for the recent decrease in Facebook organic reach. The major reason is content overload, which affects all social media sites. More content is being put onto social media sites than ever before. In the past, it was a hassle to share content with other people over the Internet, and not everyone knew how to do it. Smart phones and increasing interconnectivity between websites now allow people to easily share thoughts, links, photos, or anything else they want with the click of a button. Also, people are collecting more friends and becoming fans of more pages now than ever before.
Now that there is more content available than anyone can ever hope to see, each person is limited in what they can look at on their social media sites. Facebook states that the average person has over 1,500 to 15,000 posts that could appear on their feed each time they log into the site. As the news feed increases, the likelihood that a single post will make it to a viewer’s front page declines drastically.
Facebook attempts to show each person the information that is most relevant to their interests. Out of over 1500 possible posts, Facebook only shows you about 300. How the site determines these posts is complex. It has ever-changing algorithms that try to distinguish between high quality content and spam and determine what interests each user specifically. Not all social media sites work exactly like Facebook, but all of them are being affected by content overload, making it harder to reach out to people across the board.
What You Can Do to Improve Facebook Organic Reach
There are a few things you can do to improve your Facebook organic reach. Since each social media site is different in how they approach their news feed, what works for one site might not be as effective on another. However, these tips will help your organic reach on Facebook, which is the biggest and most researched site for organic reach, and other sites that also attempt to provide quality news feeds instead of showing you every single post.
Track Your Reach. Facebook allows you to track your organic traffic with Facebook Insights. Under the Posts tab, you can check the performance of your posts over the past month. You can click “See More” to check out older posts. You can also compare organic versus paid reach using a drop-down menu.
Publish Content that Remains Fresh. If you post content that will only remain relevant for a short period of time, it is less likely to spread and be seen by more people. You want content that will be be spread over a long period of time and continue to engage people days, weeks, or even months after the initial post.
Quality Over Quantity. You don’t need to spam posts all the time in order to be seen. In fact, this works against you. Instead, try to create quality content that will engage your fans. Exactly how many times you post depends on your business, but a general starting place is 2 or 3 posts per day. Also try a variety of post types such as text, links, videos, images, etc.
Target Your Posts. You should use post targeting when available, and Facebook offers several options. These options allow you to focus your reach to specific audiences using categories such as gender, age, location, interests, and more. On Facebook, if you target certain fans using these options, more of your total amount of fans will actually see the post on their feed.
Choose Post Time Carefully. The chance that fans will see your posts increases if you post during off-peak times of the day for business posts. If you are trying to compete with the majority of other posts, yours will probably be buried. Around 3pm is a good time when other businesses aren’t posting as much, but you might find a time that works better for you. You can also use Facebook Insights to see when most of your fans are logged in and plan accordingly.
Speak to Your Audience. According to Facebook, videos and links perform better than other types of posts, but other types might resonate more with your particular audience. You can check and see what your fans like the most using Facebook Insights. The easiest way to do that is to slowly introduce different types of posts and see how each performs over time.
Because of Facebook Insights, Facebook is probably the easiest site to use to track your fans and determine what kinds of posts they prefer, when they are online during the day, and how well your posts are reaching your target audience. If you want to improve your social media organic reach, try out some of these tips and see what works best for your business. Keep in mind that social media sites are changing all the time, and you need to stay on your toes to keep up with the latest trends.
