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This articie will help touch on important aspects that will help increase facebook organic reach so more people will see your posts. These ‘hacks’ are quite common sense, but even then a lot of people fail to implement them. Are you making these mistakes?
If you are actively involved with Facebook promotions, you have probably noticed that the amount of people that see your post, images, or videos that you post has dropped significantly. This has to do with how the Facebook algo works. It’s true, Facebook is all about fueling the capitalist machine, and making shareholders happy by boosting profits each quarter. As more and more people leave Facebook and stop using it, they have to do things like removing organic reach and forcing people that want their content to be seen to use paid advertising.
Organic reach on Facebook was always a key thing to consider if you wanted your content to be seen. But in 2021 the situation is a bit different. Their ad system made organic reach harder and less useful than ever before. Some might even argue that organic reach is useless nowadays. Organic reach will also have a place on the platform, no matter how greedy Facebook gets!
To realize just how much Facebook gimped organic reach let’s see how it changed. Once upon a time organic was everything. Ads weren’t a thing, or if they were, they were not a serious consideration. But now organic traffic accounts for only around 5% of the total traffic. This means that effectively if you don’t advertise, you will only reach 5% of your followers.
But still, organic reach isn’t dead yet! It still has a massive impact on any business. Organic traffic has better conversion rates, people are more likely to follow you, and interact with your content. It is also incredible for reducing your CPC on paid campaigns.
Also, the organic reach can be boosted massively by using some of Facebook’s new features. Facebook Stories, Watch, Groups, and Live all play an important role. You can reach a broader audience by utilizing these features as well as usual posting. The competition is far lower in these new features so you should find much more success there.
How The Feed Algorithm Works
Before starting to optimize anything, you need to know how the feed works. Facebook uses a combo of hundreds of factors that decide what to show you on your feed. Their goal is to find things that you might click on and that you will like while making them the most amount of money. Facebook is a business, after all, money is the key to it all.
The factors are not known, at least not fully, they are a company secret. Facebook’s secret sauce, if you like. As always, we can get close to their factors by making an educated guess. These are some things that are considered to have an impact, even though Facebook doesn’t have an official statement about them, but if you think about it, these points make sense!
- Posting date (the newer the better)
- Posting consistency (it’s looking for consistent posting, not frequent posting)
- Post interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc)
- Interaction with the comments by the poster
- How frequent users interact with posts by the poster
- Negative feedback on the post
- How useful the post is
- What kind of creating the post uses
- What type of post is it (feed post, story, video, etc)
There are also a couple of things that the algorithm doesn’t like.
This like too much automation can harm your organic reach. Social media needs that human touch that makes each post feel unique. If you have an automated system that pops out, post after post, without considering anything then your organic reach won’t be that great. Posting relevant posts and maybe a couple of team photos always makes you feel more personal and in turn has a chance of growing your organic reach.
Promoting your products too much can also have huge downsides. Organic reach is all about people liking your posts. If you promote too many people won’t hesitate to unfollow, unlike your page, leaving you in a bad spot. This is why when trying to grow your organic reach you should follow the 80-20 rule. Make 80% of your posts more social, while the 20% should be promos.
Trying to cheat the system is also a big no-no. Buying likes and followers may have worked 10 years ago but today it’s a different story. Even if Facebook doesn’t recognize that you bought these followers and likes won’t bring you much. Facebook is also known for shadowbanning your posts so your organic reach will go down drastically. Just save your money and do it in the regular style.
A weird thing that can also be a hindrance to organic growth is having too big of an audience. What? That can be an issue too? Oh yeah, the point with Facebook is that it’s trying to optimize the posts shown to every person. If you have a lot of followers, they are most likely interested in different things and FB won’t show your posts to each of them. This can be a problem and it’s a hard one to solve. But it’s better to have a smaller and engaged audience than a large and inactive one.
Ok so now let’s get to the meat of this article. How can you improve your organic reach on facebook?
The Best Strategies to Boost Organic Reach
Make Your Campaigns Targeted, Use Text That Speaks To An Audience With Keywords And Phrases They Recognize
Quality over quantity is always the way to go when organic reach is in question. Your campaigns should all focus on specific people and demographics that can bring likes and interaction to your page.
Target the Right people, it will help you gain more views because they will engage with your content.
Randomly targeting your potential audience isn’t a great thing to do. If you can, you should always try to attract the right kind of people to your page. This way your organic reach on Facebook will grow as you get a better audience. The more your audience is in line with your page, the more likely they will see your page pop up in their feed.
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Audience Insights Targeting is About Learning Who Your Ideal Customer “Avatar” is like.
To properly target people, you need to find what your ideal customer is. Gender, location, age, occupation, education, etc all make great data points that can help you better target people.
You need to figure out what they are interested in. What bothers them. What they dislike etc to get an ideal profile for your targeting.
When you find the perfect audience for your page, create a custom audience modeled by that ideal. This way you will most likely reach those people far more easily and get that boost you need.
Brand Presence – Be sure to use your logo on images in your posts
The stronger your brand is the better for your business. A constant and clear message by your brand is one of the best things you can have. This will lead to the right people discovering your page and consistently interacting with it.
Use Available Features and Customizations – These advanced hacks can be accessed from the settings inside Facebook Page manager.
Facebook offers a lot of interesting features that most pages just glance over. You can use these features to better rank and appear more on people’s feeds. This works because the competition on these features is fast less and you can get recommended more easily.
Some of these features include:
- Custom tabs
- Podcasts
- Watch Tab
- Quizzes
- Polls
- Landing Pages
- Apps
- Ecommerce Tabs
- Email Capture forms
- Blogs and RSS feeds
- Etc
This is the same thing that shocked the YouTube world a couple of weeks/ months ago. On YouTube, the additional features people didn’t use were Polls and community posts in general. And people who used them before, when they weren’t popular got a lot more views and engagement for free. It’s the same idea and it works well, so use it!
Some recent updates also gave incredible tools and features that can be great for spreading your organic reach.
- Messenger Bots – great for engaging with the users
- FB Stories – Visual content aimed at the younger population
- FB Watch – For videos and streams
- FB Marketplace – Great place for selling your products
- FB Offers – Here you can create discounts and promotions for your business page.
I have 13 awesome tips on how to blow up the popularity of your FB Fan Page right here
Cross-Promotions Work Great To Increase Organic Reach
Cross-promotions are great for organic reach. This means that you promote your Facebook page on your Instagram page, or any other social media you have a following on. This can bring you a lot of people that like you on one platform without liking you on the other one.
Doing cross promotions is pretty easy as well. You can leave your links in the description or bio of your profile, place clickable icons on those platforms that promote it.
Word of Mouth Marketing – An oldie but goodie even online!
Word of mouth is the oldest and one of the best ways of marketing your brand. Most companies use it to some extent and you should too! Leveraging your fans to spread your message is a great thing. Doing this is easier said than done, but here are some ideas on how to achieve this:
- Reaching out to your top fans
- Offer rewards
- Create a referral program
- Have great customer service
- Measure your success
Partnering With Other Pages Can Help You Get More Organic Reach Through Their Channels Too
Most marketers love doing everything themselves. They see everyone as competition and thus they miss a big part of organic reach. Partnerships! You can find a lot of pages within your niche or some niche close to yours and partner with them. You can cross-promote each other’s pages and gain valuable audience members that might not have access to your page before.
Organic reach loves this as you will gain more users and those users will attract even more organic users. It’s a win-win for both parties as each page should get something they previously didn’t have.
This isn’t reserved for small pages. Even pages with millions of likes usually shout out each other and share each other’s posts. As I said, it’s a win-win situation for everyone.
Timeless Content – Also named Ever Green Helps Get Organic Views for Months if Not Years!
Facebook as well as other platforms love new and trending content. Things that are not trending at all are usually a bad way to promote your brand as people will not read it and engage with it. Or at least not to the scale they would with trending topics. This is why Evergreen content is great. These are always popular topics that are never really trending hard but are always present in our feeds.
This kind of content can also appear on your prospects’ feeds hours or days after posting. Trending topics usually tend to disappear after a few hours. A good tactic to use is to write evergreen content and then repurpose it later so you get more out of your work.
After you have already created a back catalog of posts, analyze them and see which ones were doing well and which didn’t. Put the ones that were good in one sheet and use them for the future. You can rewrite them, put a new spin on them, make some updates and adjustments, and use the same content again, just with a few twists. This will keep it fresh and exciting for new readers and it will give you a lot more engagement/views in the long run.
Use Content From Others – It’s Okay, Everyone Does It For Inspiration
You can also do the smart thing and research what your competitors are doing. You can take note of their most successful campaigns and get inspired by them. Put your insight, twists, and research into their content and create something unique, jet recognizable.
You can even adapt other types of media to your posts. You can turn podcasts, videos, infographics, testimonials, lists, reviews, tutorials, news, etc into the content pieces you need. This will ensure your audience has cool new things to look forward to and engage with. Organic reach is all about having the right content. And having evergreen content is a great way to ensure your organic reach is doing well.
Timing Your Posts – It’s All About When Your Audience Is Online
When is the perfect time to post on Facebook? Well, there is no definite answer to that one. The most popular time is usually around midday as then most users are using the platform. But this is also the most competitive time to post as well. A thing you can do is try to time your posts to when others are not posting.
To know when to post you need to know the location of your audience (time zones are a thing you know), your audience profile (older people usually go to bed sooner), and the content type you are posting.
Look into your Facebook insights and see what times are optimal for you. Try finding off-peak hours when there are still users online so that you can rank higher on those times.
Organic Post Targeting – A Great Hack For Your Facebook Page
Facebook ads aren’t the only thing you can target on Facebook. A great way to boost your organic reach is to target your posts towards the right audience. This can be done by enabling “audience optimization for posts” within the page settings. There you can further customize the audience under “restricted audience” and target the part of the audience you think will best respond to your content.
After doing that you can run a few targeted posts using varying parameters to make sure it works and makes a difference.
Cater To Your Audience, It will help get more people to see your posts
It doesn’t take a marketing genius to realize that writing the content your audience likes is a lot better than doing the opposite. Status updates, links, photos, should all be in a style and manner that your audience appreciates. The more they like them, the more they will engage with the content. Simple!
To find what types of content your audience likes the best, check your Facebook data and analyze it properly. See what gets the most engagement and make more of it. If you want to introduce new types of content, you can ask your audience via a poll to see what they would like the best.
Run Contests, Facebook Loves It and Rewards it with Organic Reach
A great way to get organic growth is through giveaways, sweepstakes, and contests. These are all simple ways to broaden your organic reach by offering something for free.
You can create intricate contests that require your audience to like your page, follow it, follow it on other social media as well, share the posts, etc. The possibilities are vast, but if you make it too demanding, people won’t be as inclined to do it, so try striking a balance.
You can also try and create a hashtag that you can push for to become viral. Promote your contest on all social media channels, include links to your homepage or blog so that people visit it. Get their emails so you can select the winners and retarget the losers. Write blog posts and promotions for your contests. Create a referral system to incentivize sharing.
If everything is done properly you should have an incredible audience base that you can later retarget and expand your organic reach.
Sticking Out to get more Organic Reach on Facebook
You don’t want to blend in with the background, you want to stand out so that people register your existence. Everything needs to be optimized so that people notice you.
- Avoid certain grays, whites, and blues as they fit into the Facebook UI too much. Use vibrant colors that are contrasty but not an eyesore.
- Use multiple creatives for each post and do a lot of A/B testing to make sure it works as intended.
- Add the CTA button on the image, people are visual beings, so the more visual “help” they have the better.
- Don’t write long posts every time. People have short attention spans and posts with 80 characters or less perform better on average.
- Ask questions. Always ask your audience something so that they have a reason to interact with you.
Unpublished or “Dark” Posts and Facebook’s Algorithm
These weird-sounding posts are simple unpublished posts that show up as ads to your audience. Users cant search for them on your timeline but they will pop up on their news feed now and then. These are ads that won’t turn off your audience as are aimed primarily at reaching new audiences.
With them, you can split test different approaches and cater your ads to new audiences. Also, facebook’s algorithm will love it because you won’t be promoting your page even more for people that already engage with your content.
You can do this by creating a post in the ads manager. Choose the option “only use this post for an ad” and create the post. From the action dropdown
In Conclusion about Facebook Organic Reach
If you want to grow your facebook page and do it via organic reach, there are some things that you should focus on. As you can see there are a lot of things that you can do to boost your reach. Some of the most obvious are, standing out from the rest, writing good content, and having interesting topics in general, but there are more things you can do.
Even though Facebook is constantly lessening the impact organic reach has, it still has a place and it is something you should still try and spend some time on getting right.
Check this post: 12 Proven Facebook Post Ideas That Will Help Boost Your Organic Reach!
