Have you found your organic reach on Facebook has taken a nosedive? You may be wondering how to improve organic reach on Facebook and if it’s even possible. While it’s becoming more of a “pay-to-play” platform, there are still some creative ways to get your posts in front of your ideal audience without pulling out your wallet. Today, we’ll go over a couple of strategies that will tell the Facebook algorithm what type of business you are and who your ideal customer base is.
With Apple’s dreaded changes, off-platform actions are increasingly difficult for Facebook to track as iOS 14 users can now opt-out of data collection and tracking. With Facebook getting limited data, the information they get from their platform becomes increasingly important. If Facebook begins to understand what kind of content you create and who your ideal audience is, it’s in their best interest to share your organic content to track more data about their users.
Get Your Page In Front of The Right Audience
The first step is to determine who your niche is. You want to be specific, but at the same time, you don’t want it to be too narrow, making it difficult for Facebook to find your ideal customer profile. A great free tool to learn about your audience is with the Facebook Audience Insights. It’s free for anyone with a Facebook page and gives you access to data on audiences’ interests and demographics. You can see the pages they follow, their activity levels, device types, and more.
You can enter your niche phrase into the “Interest” section and get a considerable amount of information about them. The example in the photo above is searching for those who are interested in “used cars.” You can check how engaged this audience is by seeing how often they like, comment, and share posts each month.
*Note: Starting on July 1st, 2021, Audience Insights will no longer be available, but you can still access similar audience information on Facebook Business Suite Insights.
Communicate With Facebook
In addition to searching keywords in your niche, you can look at the audience data of other Facebook pages. The goal here is to find pages in your industry that have audiences similar to those you want to attract. Use the Activity tab to check to make sure they’re an engaged audience that will likely engage with your posts as well.
Once you’ve found a page with an audience you want to get your posts in front of; you want to tell Facebook that your page is similar to the other one. The way you communicate this message to Facebook is with signals. These are some signals that tell the platform that your pages are similar:
- Leave a comment on their page
- Tag the page in one of your posts
- Share content from their page on your page
- Collaborate with the other page
These actions communicate to Facebook that your page is similar to the other one, and Facebook will begin to drive traffic from the other page to your page.
Send The Right Message
When you put the right message in front of the right audience, they’ll want to share that content with the people around them. This type of message isn’t about your products or services but more about how your audience identifies. Facebook users know that when they comment or like a post, it shows up in their friend’s newsfeed. As a result, people want to engage with things on Facebook that make them look and feel good. If the message aligns with what they perceive about themselves and wants others to perceive them, they’ll naturally want to share. Posts that make a good impression on people tend to have high interaction rates.
You want your audience to self-identify with your posts in a positive way. For example, a piece of content titled “10 Ways To Lose Weight” may align with your customer’s interests, but they likely won’t share it because they may not want others to know they’re trying to lose weight. By changing the message to “Why I Run First Thing in The Morning,” you put a positive spin on the message and gives your audience an identity that they’re inclined to share with others.
Post Engaging Content
Now that you’ve crafted the right message for your audience, you want to create content that your audience wants to engage with. Again, you want to send signals to Facebook, so the algorithm sees your page as relevant to this audience. Signals include likes, reactions, comments, shares, and saves. While there’s no specific formula for getting engagement from your customers, certain types of posts are more likely to result in different actions.
Likes & Reactions: You’re more likely to get likes from photos than videos. Memes, humor, quotes, behind-the-scenes, inspiration, personal, or content that evokes emotion tend to get more reactions.
Share & Save: People are more likely to share or save a video versus a photo. Sharing and saving is considered a stronger signal than liking or commenting, so when someone takes this action, it lets Facebook know that it’s quality content. Use multiple 30-second videos to achieve higher engagement rates. If you have a longer video you want to post to Facebook, break it up into multiple videos that will play one after another. Remember, most people on Facebook watch videos with the sound off, so make sure to include captions or text overlay, so it’s easily understandable without sound.
Comments: To get comments on your post, you want to create conversation starters that your audience can’t help but answer. For example, by saying, “Do you prefer going to the gym before or after work?” your audience may respond with their preference and then explain their reasoning. When they leave a long comment, Facebook sees this as a good indicator of quality content.
Promote Your Product or Service
Once you’ve built up a fan base that trusts you and engages with your content, you can then post about your product/service. Think of it as a conversation. The first couple of steps is where you and your customers get to know each other and establish that you have the same interests and goals. Once they trust you, they’ll be more open to your promotional post.
While organically growing on Facebook is not be a simple task, it can be done! It’s a great way to target the right audience and keep your customer engagement levels high. We hope our blog about how to improve organic reach on Facebook has helped give you some ideas to include in your social media strategy. If you’d like to learn more about social media marketing and how it can fit into your business plan, our team is more than happy to help! We are a full-service digital marketing and web design agency that can help you whether your just getting started or are ready to take your digital strategy to the next level. You can reach us by phone at (858) 228-7697 or fill out the form on our website, and we’ll reach out to you as soon as possible!
