How do you increase Facebook’s organic reach?
By organic, we mean increasing reach without having to pay to get your post under the noses of more people.
If you want to know what works in the online marketing industry, you have to look at the competition. Both those far above you and the weaker competitors. By doing this, you can determine why some achieve success and others fail badly in their goals.
But first, why is Facebook so important right now?
Meanwhile, there are hundreds of social networks, so why am I writing a guide on Facebook? There are several other networks that may be of interest to your business but Facebook is preferred because of its size and analytical display of your advertising campaigns.
At the beginning of 2016, Facebook had more than 1.6 BILLION active users worldwide. So this is a huge customer base that you can tap into.
But it is also the social network on which most time is spent. On average, 40 minutes per person are spent daily looking at your news feed, or in other words, your Timeline.
Last but not least, people like to click on outbound links (preferably a link to your website)
Will Facebook become less important in the future?
If you’ve had your own business’s page online for a while, you’ve probably also noticed that your organic reach has declined in recent years.
There are 2 reasons for this :
- Because Facebook wants to avoid putting too much on someone’s page at once. There are some 18 million pages competing to get on someone’s newsfeed.
- Above all, Facebook wants to make money. So if you pay (in the form of ads) you get preferential treatment.
Does this make Facebook less useful? Not at all, you just have to learn to deal with it correctly.
1. How is your reach determined?
Since this is not officially released by Facebook, this cannot be said with 100% certainty and it is possible that the algorithm has already been changed by the time you read this. There are hundreds or even thousands of small factors that help determine whether you see a message appear.
It makes sense that when you post online, your posts will be shown to a subset of the people who follow or have liked your page. But not everyone who likes your page gets to see it.
Some tips :
- One of the most important factors determining whether your “likers” see your post is the level of engagement. This may be in the form of likes, shares, clicks, comments….
- Competition is also a crucial factor. Say you have a fitness page, and you post a new message at 9 p.m. along with other major Facebook pages in the fitness industry. Then your reach will be much lower than putting your post online at a time when the competition is offline.
- Are many of your posts marked as spam or reported?
- It takes into account what the user’s personal preference is.
- Also, the speed of your Internet as well as the type of computer you use also play a role. (so mac users generally get to see slightly more expensive ads)
- The longer your post has been online the lower the chance that someone will see it.
1. When should you post?
It’s not when you think.
Intuitively, you would think you should post when most of the people in your target audience are online. But Buzzsumo has shown with extensive research that just the opposite is true.
But since your competition will be throwing its posts online at the same time, chances are that yours will disappear among a giant pile of “clutter.” So this also lowers the probability of engagement with the effect of further lowering your organic reach in the future.
So what should you do?
The bottom line is that it is best to post between 9 and 11 in the evening. (in the time zone that your followers are active) This comes just after the largest block of posts.
Of course, when you are at the top of your industry with millions of followers, you can afford to post at peak times.
2. six types of content you can post
- Questions (plain text)
- Images
- Videos
- Links to websites
- Give away actions
- Coupons and discounts
But there is something that converts even better than the above types.
Namely, the different types combined.
For example, this could be a photo with captioned text.
In general, we can conclude that images and videos have the best effect on engaging your target audience. Videos are best shared.
3. Not every day is created equal on social media
You want to save your most important posts until the weekend. Posts such as links to your website or a product announcement are best sent out into the world in the best possible conditions. This is how you achieve a better conversion rate.
The higher interaction on weekends is because fewer people have to work and thus have more time to check their Facebook wall at regular intervals.
4. Approximately how long should an article be?
If you use Facebook as a business you are going to regularly post links to your website to sell products or as an advertising tool. As mentioned above, people enjoy clicking on external links.
But apparently they do have a certain preference for clicking on a link.
Articles under 1000 words receive the lowest interaction rate while articles that go deep into a topic with 1000 to 2000 words do best. (This is also best for your SEO)
Also nice to know is that articles of more than 3,000 words will in turn perform worse.
To finish, well-crafted articles are preferred by Facebook users but they also don’t want to have to read for hours.
5. Your visitors also want to do something other than just read
There are 2 main components of your posts on Facebook. Namely, the explanation to your post and the link to media you add.
Short accompanying explanations do better than long texts.
Texts of about 50 words that give a good indication of what your link is about have the best effect of being clicked on. The more text there is the lower the interaction will be on average.
So you better leave the long well thought out texts to your website.
6. Videos are shared a lot, right?
As we have seen before, this is indeed the case. Unless you post links from Youtube .
The 2 most common ways to deal with video are
- Embed from Youtube
- Upload directly from your computer
Logically, this should not give much difference but there is apparently a big difference in correlation to engagement.
On average, interaction with Youtube videos is 6 times lower than directly uploaded videos.
Why this is so, we do not know. (Perhaps because Youtube is a source of competition for Facebook?)
How do you post a video directly?
If you want to put a new post online, click “upload photo/video” and choose a file from your computer. Just fill in the options like the title and you’re done.
7. Link between Facebook and Instagram?
You’ve probably seen several posts pass by yourself that say in small gray letters that it was posted via Instagram .
If you use Instagram yourself, you can indicate as an option that everything you post there will automatically be posted on Facebook along with it.
It looks just the same as if you would have uploaded it via Facebook apart from the little gray text.
Images that come in via IG receive an average of 23% more interaction than images uploaded directly.
This is probably because Instagram was bought over by Facebook, allowing them to expand both their channels without putting in much extra work.
8. Using Hashtags? #dontdoit
You know them, they are preceded with the # sign to represent a certain theme.
On social media like Twitter, it’s best to keep using them but for Facebook, they’re not going to make a difference.
Unless you have a specific reason for wanting to use hashtags, it’s best to avoid them.
What dates should you look at?
There are many more indicators of success than reach, traffic and sales from Facebook.
Facebook gives you an analytics dashboard where you can track everything nicely. This allows you to determine exactly who your target audience is, what they like and what they will click on.
We’ve already said it, Facebook changes its algorithm regularly and we cannot possibly predict what it will do in the future. But if you keep these 8 rules in mind you will come a long way.
The best thing you can do is always do some tests yourself on your target audience and followers. You can schedule messages in advance to see what worked best afterwards.
For example, 2 similar posts at 9 in the morning and at 9 in the evening. What is the difference in interaction between the 2?….
Using several small A/B split tests, you can perfectly determine the optimal time and conditions to post.
