As organic reach continues to decline on Facebook (mine is currently at about 15%, but I hear reports of most people’s being 10% or less), it becomes more and more important all the time to post strategically to Facebook.
It’s been a while since I talked about how Facebook’s algorithm works (and it’s included in today’s infographic), so let’s review that. There are three main ways FB calculates what you see or don’t see in your news feed:
- Decay/Time: If someone posts at 9 am, and you don’t log on to Facebook until 6 pm, there’s not much chance you’ll see that post. It’s been replaced by all the other posts that have come in since then.
- Affinity: You see more posts from people and brands you’ve had recent interactions with, and less posts from people and brands you’ve not had recent interactions with.
- Weight: Facebook puts a higher weight on photos and videos–they get more views than say, a plain text status update.
There’s a huge emphasis on creating posts that boost engagement these days on Facebook. The reason is, the more engagement your post gets, the better it’s going to do, reach-wise. It’s a product of the algorithm. The more comments, likes and shares a post gets, the more people will see it.
So, here are some tips to help increase your Facebook organic reach:
- Ask questions. It’s the best way to get people to respond and engage them in a discussion.
- Use self-explanatory photos, like infographics. People love them (you’re reading this post, aren’t you??), and they are really handy. Our brains can process images way faster than we can words.
- Use video. Video is getting a much broader reach, but in order for it to have impact, it has to be native (meaning you have to upload the video, you can’t share a YouTube link).
- Show faces. As humans, we want to connect to other humans–show your team’s faces, go behind the scenes and give people a glimpse of what it’s like to work at your business. Don’t be afraid to show personality and humour.
- Try posting at off-peak times. Insights can tell you when the best times of the day to post are, meaning when most people are online that like your page. But there’s also the most competition for eyeballs at that time. Experiment and try playing around with posting at non-peak times and see if that gets you more reach.
Now for today’s infographic!
Infographic courtesy of Search Engine Journal.