9 Expert Insights to Increase Your Organic Reach on Facebook

9 Expert Insights to Increase Your Organic Reach on Facebook

You’re probably already using Facebook to engage with your audience. And in this post, you’ll learn nine ways to gather actionable data from these reports, then use that insight to increase your organic reach. How to use Facebook Insights to increase your reach So, reaching your audience with organic content is essential for achieving significant results with Facebook. After all, your goal isn’t just to know what your organic reach is — it’s to increase that number. This means that to achieve high organic reach, you need to create content that generates engagement from your audience. The more you post the type of content your audience likes to see, the more effective you’ll be at generating engagement and reaching your goals on the platform. From the Posts tab, select “Top Posts from Pages You Watch.” This report shows data from pages you’ve identified as competitors. But your posts will only ever show up in the feeds of users who’ve chosen to follow you — meaning that your potential organic reach is limited to that number of users. Fortunately, this is an easy metric to monitor using the “Net Followers” report, which you can find under the Followers tab. Learn who your followers are The more you know about your followers, the more effective you’ll be in creating content that’s relevant to their needs and interests.

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You’re probably already using Facebook to engage with your audience.

The platform has established itself as indispensable within the social media marketing industry with 62% of marketers naming it as the most important one in their strategies.

But while 93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly, 40% say they’re unsure whether their efforts are working.

And that’s becoming an increasingly difficult question to answer.

Because Facebook’s recent algorithm update prioritizes posts from friends and family, less content from business pages is showing up in users’ News Feeds.

In fact, Facebook Ads expert Jon Loomer warns that measuring only actual, viewable impressions, as opposed to News Feed ticks, could see reach decline by up to 20%.

And as organic reach drops, ad rates continue to skyrocket — increasing by 35% in the last quarter of 2017 alone.

So with organic reach on the decline and advertising becoming more expensive than ever, reaching your audience on the platform isn’t as easy as it used to be.

But it also isn’t impossible.

Fortunately, Facebook offers a comprehensive set of analytics reports for business page owners.

And in this post, you’ll learn nine ways to gather actionable data from these reports, then use that insight to increase your organic reach.

Why organic reach matters

There’s been a continual decline in average organic Facebook page reach over the past few years.

And while that may not be news if you’ve been following the social media marketing industry, there was a more drastic drop from 2016 to 2017.

This means that marketers across the board are reaching fewer of their followers with the content they post.

But why does this matter?

Can’t you just spend some money and boost your posts so that they reach more users?

That would be the obvious solution — but personally, I don’t recommend it as an alternative to working on your organic reach.

Boosting posts, even with a well-executed strategy, is a temporary approach. Once you stop paying, you stop getting results.

Plus, the posts you boost will typically involve directing users to informational content on your site.

And while that can help you earn traffic, that traffic doesn’t generally convert at a high rate — meaning that the ROI you see will likely be low.

So while boosting posts is an effective way to generate a spike in traffic to a page on your site, it ultimately won’t lead to long-term results.

Achieving and maintaining strong organic reach, on the other hand, can boost your lead generation efforts.

And, having a strong organic reach, can contribute to your sales funnel — making it a much better goal for your Facebook marketing strategy.

How to access Facebook Insights

To access the data that Facebook provides on your business’s results, you’ll first need to navigate to your page and select “Insights” from the menu bar.

The main dashboard shows a summary of the previous seven days.

This summary includes data for your total actions on page, pageviews, page previews, page likes, page reach, and page recommendations.

It essentially gives a general overview of your weekly performance, as well as how that performance compares to the previous week.

From here, you can click any of these summaries to access more detailed information or scroll down to see data for your five most recent posts.

This section will show the date and time of each post, the post’s type and caption, as well as the reach and engagement achieved.

The reach metric will also display both organic and boosted numbers if you paid to promote any of your posts listed over the previous seven days.

Finally, your dashboard will also display weekly performance summaries of up to five pages that you’ve designated as “Pages to Watch.”

This feature is designed to help you easily compare your page’s performance with your competitors’ pages.

You can add up to five pages to track. Then this report will display each one’s total page likes as well as their increase in page likes, total posts, and total engagements.

How to use Facebook Insights to increase your reach

So, reaching your audience with organic content is essential for achieving significant results with Facebook.

But if your current approach is just to share links to new content whenever you publish it on your site, it’s unlikely you’ll see the kind of organic reach you want.

Success on the platform requires careful strategy and planning.

And when you use Facebook’s built-in reporting feature, Insights, you can learn valuable data about your audience.

This data will help you create a strategy tailored to their interests and browsing habits.

So if you’re looking to improve your results on the platform, here are nine ways to use Facebook Insights to measure your performance and improve it moving forward.

1. Use the Likes, Comments, and Shares report to identify high-performing content

One of the most popular metrics amongst Facebook marketers is reach.

You can access this data by selecting the “Reach” tab from the column on the left of the page.

Here you’ll see a report showing how many people saw content from your page on any given day.

This is a helpful report for getting a general idea of how many people read or saw your posts over a given time period.

But it doesn’t show which content they saw or whether any of those people engaged with it.

Of course, you can use this graph to identify any spikes in reach, then use those spikes as a starting point for digging deeper into your reports.

In that regard, it makes sense to glance at this report whenever you check in on your page’s results.

But you can’t draw definitive or actionable conclusions from it.

After all, your goal isn’t just to know what your organic reach is — it’s to increase that number.

And one of the best ways to do that is to focus on creating more engaging content.

When a post does well in terms of engagement, this signals to Facebook that users find it interesting. As a result, they’ll distribute that post to even more users.

This means that to achieve high organic reach, you need to create content that generates engagement from your audience.

And you can access this data in the Reactions, Comments, Shares, and More report.

Instead of focusing on reach, this report will help you identify the days on which your content sparked the most reactions among your audience.

Again, this report doesn’t show individual posts — so looking at this data alone won’t tell you which content generated a high number of likes, comments, or shares.

But once you’ve identified days on which your page saw high engagement numbers, you can use that insight to narrow in on specific posts.

This can serve as a starting point for identifying high-performing content.

Plus, you can use it to gauge your overall engagement levels over time.

And while many Facebook marketers mistakenly focus on reach, making engagement-related metrics a priority will give you a much more accurate idea of what you’re doing well.

2. Use the Posts report to compare individual posts

After you’ve used page-wide metrics to get a general idea of your Facebook results, you can use the Posts report to learn more about the performance of individual posts.

Under the Posts tab, scroll down to “All Posts Published.”

This report will list each of your recently-published posts individually, as well as the post’s type, targeting, reach, and engagement.

With this data, you can easily identify the top-performing posts on your page for any given time period.

Here again, though, you’ll want to focus on engagement instead of reach alone.

This is especially important when you consider what this metric really indicates. Every time one of your posts appears in a user’s News Feed, it adds to your reach count.

And when you think about your own browsing habits, the problem becomes apparent.

Many of us tend to scroll mindlessly through our feeds, only…

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