Is the decrease in the reach of posts of your business page starting to worry you? Don’t fret, you’re not the only one – and the solution is right in front of you. In this blog post, I’ll present a couple of ways that will help you increase organic reach and the level of engagement – for free.
In order to get to the solution of our problem, we first need to take a look at why we even have this problem.
Facebook wants my money
Even though we hear this statement quite often, we also have to look at the other point of view. If the reach of business pages was the same as the reach of personal profiles, you’d first need to get through the enormous amounts of promotional material before seeing your friend’s new puppy, reading about your brother’s conspiracy theories and liking your boss’s delicious-looking lunch – every time you visited Facebook. I’m sure you’d be very happy about that. :-) Facebook’s goal is therefore not emptying our pockets but ensuring us a good user experience.
We can blame the amount of posts
Due to the enormous amounts of content Facebook introduced an algorithm that gives precedence to personal profiles instead of business pages. This unfortunately puts a lot of pressure on the owners of those pages, because the content needs to be even more compelling in order to attract and excite as many followers as possible. You must have noticed yourself that a high number of followers doesn’t necessarily bring a high level of engagement (that is comments, likes and shares). Those of you who are lucky will be able to show your content to 10% of your followers, while some report on even lower numbers. Seeing how you’re reading this article, I dare presume you also have that problem.
The “Insights” tab is your best friend
Before you wrongly accuse Facebook, head over to the “Insights” tab, which can be found on the top of your business page. There, you can find all the information about organic and paid reach. If you take a look at the numbers from the last few months, you can get the sense in which direction the trend is headed.
In order to reach your followers as easily as possible, I suggest a couple of simple steps for increasing organic reach and the level of engagement.
1. Get close to your followers.
We all like to feel important. Don’t forget to answer a comment or a suggestion given to you by your followers. People like to see that there is a real person behind the official “facade”; a person they can turn to and who will understand them. If they’ve taken the time to reach out to you, you should also take your time for them and they’ll be more than happy to return to you.
2. Discover the right type of posts.
Are you only posting links? Is your page full of “Quotes of the day” and inspiring thoughts? If all your posts are similar, I’m sure you’re not getting the reach and engagement you’d want to. In the tab “Insights” you can regularly check which posts work best with your followers – from the type of post to the content posted. You can even find some inspiration in the posts from your competition and what engagement they get.
By choosing the right content increased reach will undoubtedly follow, but you must still stick to the rule of posting different types of posts for achieving the best result. And another heads up: the current algorithm greatly favors video posts so I would warmly recommend using them.
3. Figure out when and how often.
I hope that while reading this title you didn’t expect me to just give you the magical number. The answer to the question would be: while your competition is sleeping. This differs from company to company since audiences differ from one another. Once you figure out the winning combination, success is inevitable.
4. Quality before quantity — add value!
I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed that posts with photos usually get a higher engagement. This was also confirmed in a research by Buzzsumo: posts with photos supposedly get 2.3 times more engagement.
This of course doesn’t mean that every photo is appropriate. For a better engagement use a high-quality, branded photo. Let the photos wear your signature – either by using a color filter, a logo or an added caricature. Namely, you need something that will make your followers connect your photos with your brand, so that they immediately think of you when they see your photos.
5. Choose your audience.
Choosing your audience is a function that’s been introduced a while ago but is only rarely used. Your followers prefer some of your posts over others so choose who you would like to show certain content to. Showing everything to everyone means that certain people (who aren’t that interested in a particular content) won’t respond to your post, which can already significantly lower your organic reach since Facebook will see those posts as being irrelevant.
You can choose a group of followers according to their gender, age, location, language, interests and so on, which can turn out to be particularly useful with pages with a large number of followers.
