For some time now, Facebook’s organic post reach has been in decline. You may have 1,000 likes on your business page, but how many of the people who have liked your page are actually seeing your message? Well, it depends on how often people engage with your content, but the figures are alarming: estimates are around 10%, but some writers put the number as low as 1%. So your 1,000 likes may result in only 10 people seeing your post.
Reach is a key content marketing metric marketers use on Facebook to measure brand awareness, after all, if you don’t know how to reach your followers, you will fail no matter how many followers you have. But what does Facebook Reach even mean?
According to Facebook, Reach is an estimated metric that calculates the unique number of people who saw any piece of content from your Page or about your Page. In essence, it is the count of Facebook users who came into contact with your brand on Facebook.
In this blog post, we set out to share our best recommendations on how you can widen the reach of your audience on Facebook and boost your success on the social network. Enjoy!
Table of Contents
1. Be Personal
2. Use Hashtags
3. Use Facebook comments to engage on blogs
4. Use Call to Actions
5. Ask Questions
6. Connect with other pages
7. Use images when creating content
8. Built-In Social Media Monitoring: Use Facebook Insights
9. Learn from the Best
10. Advertise Your Facebook Posts
1. Be Personal
Nobody wants to engage with a boring brand. Think of your presence on Facebook like a show performance: your content should be there to educate, enlighten and entertain. To generate engagement and increase Facebook audience reach, create content where you can showcase your staff, behind the scenes clips, and shine a light on your customers and how your products or services are solving their problem.
It also helps to pay attention to what your audience likes to learn from you. Use a social listening tool to gauge the topics that your target audience is engaging in, and generate personalized content according to what your audience is already talking about.
2. Use Hashtags
Hashtags today are everywhere and you need to learn how to incorporate them into your social media strategy to increase your organic reach and get seen on your followers' News Feed. To develop your Facebook hashtag strategy, start by searching for hashtags that would be relevant to your business (including your business name) and see if people are already using them. You’ll also want to search for currently trending (or viral) hashtags to see if you might be able to create a connection with your brand and piggyback on existing engagement. You can use a social media analytics tool and Facebook analytics to provide you with this type of insight.
3. Use Facebook comments to engage on blogs
The Internet is one big content repository, and a lot of it can be of interest to your company and your followers. Curation is the new creation, and content marketing has now been democratized, so all you have to do is look around to associate relevant content to your own interests and brand. I bet that you already are following some blogs relevant to your company (and if not, you should), and I bet that some of these blogs use Facebook comments. Why not add some thoughts on relevant posts — but instead of linking them to your personal page, add them as your business.
Just click the Change link in the comment section, select your business page, and write your (interesting, thought-provoking) comment. This will be seen by everyone who is reading the comments thus increasing your business page's organic reach on Facebook.
4. Use Call to Actions
“Like this post if you love pizza!”
“Did you find this post insightful? Share it with your friends!”
“What do you think? Add your comment in the section below.”
CTAs are a direct marketing tactic, and they’re a great way to get audiences to engage with your Facebook posts and share them with their friends, which will, in turn, boost your entire organic reach on Facebook.
Using calls to action can be a slippery road, though. You don’t want to overdo it, and it should be natural. Make sure you consider the wider business objective when thinking of what call to action to use in your Facebook social media strategy.
Tip: Don't post clickbait!
Contests are a great way to improve your organic reach on Facebook! You've probably seen a post that looks something like this:
“Win a free dinner for two! Like this post and let us know in the comments below why you should win. The comment with the most likes wins!
Let your friends know and share this post.”
Businesses are able to collect competition entries by having users comment, like, or share a post, but be careful when executing such a strategy. If you are using language like "Tag a friend" or "Like and Share this post!" Facebook may view the content as clickbait after a recent update.
5. Ask Questions
You would be surprised by the effect that asking questions has on your engagement levels. People enjoy being asked their opinion and are often happy to share it. So use content that solicits your audience's opinions by as asking open questions, caption competitions, and fill-in-the-blank competitions. These types of posts are a good way to expand your reach not only to your existing audience but to new people too.
Asking someone a question is a great way to engage that person and stop them from continuing to scroll through their newsfeed. Asking questions to your followers activates them, leading to greater reach for your Facebook Page. At the same time, it gives you the answers to questions that may be crucial for your company’s sales and social media marketing strategy.
Keep in mind though that the goal of asking questions should be to start a discussion — and you need to be a part of that discussion! Reply to your followers’ comments and make sure that the discussion not only increases your Facebook reach but that they also provide value to your followers.
6. Connect with other pages
Liking and connecting with other companies on Facebook can help improve your organic reach. When you engage on another relevant page's content, your brand will appear in the newsfeed of their followers, therefore, helping to extend your reach to new audiences and boost brand awareness as a result.
The more users who like and comment on your post, the more users you’ll reach via their activity feeds.
7. Use images when creating content
There is nothing more effective in maximizing organic reach on Facebook than excellent content. If you produce content that is fantastic, then people will engage with it, and if people engage with your content, they are more likely to see your posts, thus boosting your reach.
One sure way to target the right people with your content is to use images in your Facebook posts. This helps to boost engagement as Facebook's algorithm prioritizes posts with pics. But what sort of images should you post?
We recommend using high-quality images, quirky images, images of your employee and/or clients, images of how one can use your products, and images that show the joy that your company brings in your content. For recommendations on what size your Facebook images should be, see our blog outlining the social media image sizes.
8. Built-In Social Media Monitoring: Use Facebook Insights
The Facebook insights section has improved dramatically over the years and you can now easily find out what time is best to post your message, what type of content works best, and what your audience looks like (gender, age, location, etc.). You can also send messages to targeted areas of your page — for example, you can send a post to an audience segmented by location, gender, age, or language. The more specific the message, the better the engagement.
to understand how our Paid Social Analytics can help you get even more efficient!
9. Learn from the Best
There are millions of companies that have spent the past few years improving their reach on Facebook. So, it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of “tricks” have already been tried out by other companies. But who are the companies that reach more and more users every day? Who are the companies that are great at engaging their followers?
Well, it’s not that hard to find out—and that business intelligence is actually free!
10. Advertise Your Facebook Posts
We know that we said there were ways of boosting your Facebook post without breaking the bank, so why mention advertising? Well, Facebook advertising doesn’t need to be expensive. You can run a full campaign where you can select your audience and budget, or you can choose to ‘boost’ a post. This is where you can choose to spend a small amount of money to reach an audience that you select with one of your posts. You can see the number of people you are reaching as well as how that changes if you amend your budget.
