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Looking for ways to more effectively reach your audience?
With changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm, you’re facing increased competition to get your content in front of your fans.
In this article I’ll show you five ways to improve your Facebook organic reach.
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How to Track Your Organic Traffic
To look at your organic traffic, you need to dig into your Facebook Insights. Go to the Posts tab to check out your posts’ performance for the last month. Click on See More to find out about older posts.
You can track your post reach in terms of organic and paid by selecting Organic/Paid from the Reach drop-down menu.
Look at three months of data at least. If you discover your organic reach is gradually decreasing or you simply want to improve your results, there are a number of ways you can do that.
#1: Publish Evergreen Content
The lifespan of a Facebook post depends on many factors. One is its usefulness. Even an old post can show up in your news feed if your friends like, comment or share it.
For example, this update was 18 hours old when it showed up in a user’s news feed because one of her friends liked the update. It’s as simple as that.
So when posting to Facebook, it’s important to create some evergreen content that will remain fresh and relevant to users for a long period of time. The more people engage with your content over time, the longer the lifespan of those posts.
#2: Post Quality Content, But Less Often
We’re living in an age of content overload, and Facebook is no exception. According to Facebook, “Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300.” As a Facebook marketer, you’re fighting for one of those precious spots.
You don’t need to post a high volume every day to get attention. Instead, work smarter by creating quality content. More posts won’t necessarily bring you more love from Facebook.
The graphic below shows an analysis of the Facebook pages for Coca-Cola India and Pepsi India on Fanpage Karma. Coca-Cola India posts less frequently on their Facebook page than Pepsi India, but when it comes to fan engagement, Coca-Cola India is the clear winner.
There’s no rule for how many times you should post each day. The Buffer blog suggests that two posts per day is a good number for businesses on Facebook. The Post Planner blog recommends that you post three different types of posts per day. You’ll need to figure out the right number of posts for your business. Also try to mix and match links, images, videos and text updates.
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#3: Use Organic Post Targeting to Serve Relevant Content
Facebook’s organic post targeting enables you to deliver your content to the audience most likely to engage with it. In other words, Facebook gives you the option to target your content to specific groups of fans.
Facebook offers eight options to set your target: gender, relationship status, education level, age, location, language, interests and post end date. Select the targeting options that will help you zero in on the right audience for your content.
For example, this post is targeted to 150 fans, selected by their interests and educational status.
Only the people who are most likely to be interested in this content can view it on their timeline. If this post had been targeted to all 12,000+ fans of the page, the engagement would have been much lower. Targeting posts to specific groups of fans is one way to increase your post engagement rate.
#4: Post at Off-peak Hours
During times when fewer people are sharing content on Facebook, your chances of getting noticed are higher. Typically the best time to post on Facebook is 3 pm. But you can try posting at different times, depending on when your fans are online.
Go to your Facebook Insights to check out when your fans are logged into the network. Then choose the hours when the majority of your fans are online and your competitors aren’t posting.
If you don’t know how to track your competitors and their posting trends, this article will help you find out.
#5: Choose Content Types That Resonate With Your Audience
According to a Socialbakers study published in February 2015, Facebook audiences love videos and links more than images.
If you look closely at the results of the study, images get the lowest organic impressions, links and text-only status updates perform better and video is the highest impression generator of all.
But before jumping on this trend, examine your Facebook Insights to see what type of content resonates well with your audience. If you discover that your fans still prefer images to other types of content, don’t change your strategy now. Instead, introduce different formats slowly and track how they perform.
Over to You
Facebook organic reach has gradually declined for many business pages. Try any of the tips in this article to improve the chances that your content will appear more often to your Facebook fans, through organic means.
Remember to test your tactics and adjust your content delivery accordingly.
What you do think? Have you tried any of these tactics to increase your organic reach? What changes in reach did you notice? What strategies or tactics have worked best for you? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Socialbakers website image created with Placeit.
