Have you noticed a sharp decline in your Facebook’s page organic reach in 2018? Like most Brands, your own Facebook page has experienced a drop in reach at some point in time, but perhaps none more pronounced than this year. It is no secret that Facebook has always used an algorithm to determine what appears in each user’s news-feed; but like everything else on Social Media, these algorithms have evolved. Back in 2012 for example, Facebook Page admins could expect their page posts to reach about 20% of their brand’s followers. By early 2015, that percentage dropped below 6%. While some studies have suggested that organic reach has plummeted to an average of just 2%. Whether you love him or hate him, Donald Trump knows social media. Yet even his Facebook organic reach has dropped 25% this year.
Perhaps driven by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or Fake News, or pressure from shareholders and it’s user base, Facebook news feed algorithm changes in 2018 have decided to prioritize content by “friends, family, and user groups”. At the beginning of this year, Mark Zuckerburg wrote “You’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard.” Therefore, whether you are running a Facebook Page for a charity, an organization, a band, or a business, these changes to the algorithm has made it harder for you to reach your target audience.
Despite all this organic reach for Facebook pages isn’t dead. Below are eight ways you can increase your Facebook reach without promoting your posts or advertising.
- Activate Your Page’s Advocates
The algorithm might have changed, but news feeds have not. Facebook users can still see posts from their favourite brands by selecting “See First” in their news feed preferences. While this requires some effort on the behalf of your page followers, consider asking your volunteers, staff, close friends, as well as your most loyal customers to enable the “see first” option.
Incorporate Video – Especially Live Video
Facebook live is a video broadcasting feature which allows any brand to live-stream content. You can use Facebook live to stream Q&A’s, a product launch, speeches or speaking engagement from your staff or an event or charity your organization may be hosting or attending. From our perspective, live video content remains a type of content that continues to perform well in this new algorithm so you would do well to take advantage of it. If you don’t have the resources or enough content to justify using Facebook Live, you should still use Facebook video by uploading any video content your brand has created natively. We have written extensively on the topic on increasing your Facebook video watch-time on the RBL media hub.
- Narrow Your Target Audience
Facebook admins have the option of targeting page updates based on their audiences gender, education, demographics, interests, and location. Such a feature offers brands creative ways to publish stories that will positively impact your engagement rates with specific fans segments, given the high relevance of such updates. For example, if you are planning an event in Barrie Ontario, or are posting a story specific to that region, you can narrow the reach of this post to those in that region, given they would care about the story or the event the most.
- Share Content At The Right Time
If you want your Facebook Page updates to reach more people, then it would make sense to share your updates at times when most people are online. There’s plenty of research to suggest that the best times to post a Facebook update is in the evening during the week, as well as on the weekend. But relying on broad statistics alone won’t help your reach or engagement. Rather, you should discover when YOUR fans are online, and build a content calendar around that. Go to the “Posts” section of your Facebook insight’s panel to see when people who like your page and your content are online, after that, schedule your next updates around those times when your content is most likely to reach them, as well as when they are highly engaged.
- Optimize Your Content
Since we are talking about Facebook Insight’s, it’s a good idea to take a look at what kind of content is resonating with your audience. Working under the “Posts” section of your Facebook insight’s panel, you can see a history of everything you have posted, along with some data about how many people your update reached, how many likes the update received, as well as the number shares and comments on that post as well. Try to narrow it down to your top 5 or 10 updates and start looking at patterns. What can you learn from this data? Do your fans enjoy images more than links? If so, what do these images have in common? What kind of content gets people talking? What are they saying? Moving forward, you should be delivering content with which your audience has a greater response to. After all, the point of creating and posting content on Facebook is all about them, right?
- Invite Questions On Your Facebook Page
Tempting as it may be to ask your fans to “comment” or “ask a question” at the end of your Facebook update, doing so endangers your update getting demoted in news feeds. So you need to get creative in the manner you do encourage feedback from your fans on your Facebook page. One way we accomplish this at RBL communications is by inviting shareholders to branded Facebook pages after a company webcast; a 3-5 video as a follow up to a publicly traded company’s press release, where shareholders and the investment community can ask questions and receive answers in simple English. In a similar fashion, if your company has recently hosted a webinar or launched a product, you can use your Facebook page as a discussion board, in turn, boosting both your reach and engagement.
- Make Every Update Unique
Social media scheduling platforms have made it a breeze for social media marketers to schedule updates across many social media platforms. Yet, the practice of “cross-posting”, that is sharing the same update on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media platforms often deliver the opposite results required to building a vibrant community. Hashtags are a foreign language to Facebook, while shortened links are clicked less than long links. This may also give people the impression that your page is abandoned. In order to prove your presence, make sure that the content you are creating and sharing on Facebook, is posted to your brand’s Facebook page alone. Although this adds another item to your daily bucket list, if your goal is to improve your content’s reach, then appropriating your content for each channel is a necessary step you need to take in order to achieve your goals.
- Embed Facebook Posts On Other Platforms
Finally, one of the best ways you can improve the reach of your Facebook content is to share the content off-platform. If you have a blog, you can embed some of your Facebook content in some of your posts; images and videos would work best. You can also use your email list. On average, a brand’s email list is about 10 times as large as your Facebook following. So if improving your organic reach is the goal, try embedding content from your Facebook page into your newsletters. Getting into the habit of embedding content from your Facebook page off-platform gives people an opportunity to engage with your content as well as giving you additional chances of click through’s while improving your reach.
Final Thoughts
If there is one constant for social media and digital marketing that is change. There is no reason to be frustrated when the rules of the game change as there are always ways to use Facebook – among other social networks – to your advantage. We hope that these tips are helpful for publishing content on Facebook. Have you experienced a drop in your Facebook Reach in 2018? How do you feel about this latest round of algorithm updates? Let us know in the comments below.
