Author: Mari Smith / Source: socialmediaexaminer.com Is declining reach impacting your Facebook marketing ROI? Looking to improve your Fac
Is declining reach impacting your Facebook marketing ROI?
Looking to improve your Facebook exposure?
Organic reach has become harder to achieve on Facebook and marketers are turning to creative ways to get their messages seen.
In this article, you’ll discover how to help your Facebook posts go further.
About Facebook Organic Reach
I will say, tongue-in-cheek, that “organic reach is so 2012.” It’s a fact that organic reach on Facebook is at an all-time low of 2% to 6%, and it continues to decline. What may surprise you is that having a large Facebook fan base doesn’t seem to be as beneficial as it once was. Large brand pages with more than 500,000 likes have the lowest organic reach (~2%).
More than 60 million businesses have a Facebook page, yet only 4 million are active advertisers. You can imagine that Facebook would love to entice the 56 million non-advertisers to give ads a go.
Many businesses are stuck in a pre-2012 frame of mind, hoping that if they post more often, organic reach will suddenly kick back in. But that’s just not going to happen. The good news is you can significantly improve your organic reach with strategic paid efforts. That brings us to what I call the “Mari Method”!
#1: Start With Content Optimized to Generate Attention and Shares
Highly shareable content is the holy grail of social media marketing, and doing your best to optimize for shares is my number-one content creation tip. As people scroll the Facebook news feed, your content has to make people pause and read. The promise of your content must be thumb-stopping. What you deliver has to inspire people to respond with, “OMG, I must share this now!”
The Facebook news feed algorithms reward active advertisers and engaging content. The more reactions, comments, and shares your posts get, the better their reach. This goes for both organic and paid (your advertising dollars will go further).
One of my favorite examples is this hilarious video by photo book publishing company Chatbooks. Granted, the company hired an agency and professional actress, but the outcome is better than anyone could’ve imagined: a whopping 63 million views and counting on Facebook! Not bad for a page with 150,000 fans (which has grown significantly since the video was posted in October 2016).
This is the perfect example of highly shareable video content that’s both entertaining and relevant. It’s a good day when you can get your audience and their friends sharing your video ads. The viral nature of this hit post has helped elevate both organic and paid reach.
The video post has continued to gain exponential traction over the past six months since it was first published. Chatbooks periodically pins the video to the top of their page, another great strategy for high-performing posts. They also published the same video on their YouTube channel, where it has received more than 6 million views.
As you develop your posting strategy, remember to minimize your ask; not every piece of content needs to have a call to action (CTA). Create a mix of content that combines promotional posts with posts that add value, educate, and entertain. And when you do include a CTA, keep it simple.
Pro Tip: Consider using a ratio of five non-promotional posts to every one promotional post.
#2: Build Organic Traction Before Promoting Posts With Ads
To get more mileage from your paid reach, let your posts run for 1-24 hours to gain some organic traction before boosting them. While increased organic reach is never guaranteed, there are ways to give your Facebook posts a better chance of good reach.
Here are some tips to make your content more likely to attract the views that yield shares and reach.
Post More Native and Live Video
Video continues to hold sway on Facebook with triple the engagement and 1200% more shares than text and image posts combined. In addition, when compared to YouTube video shared on Facebook, native video uploaded to Facebook has 10 times the reach.
And because Facebook’s algorithm factors in the time spent on a video, as well as the shares it generates, you can use video to gain more visibility and reach on the platform.
Below is an example of a recent 40-minute “Ask Me Anything” Facebook Live broadcast I hosted on my business page. Remember, Facebook is favoring longer videos in the news feed now.
Although there’s no definitive answer to what Facebook means by “longer,” aim for 5-20 minutes or more if you can. Facebook is testing mid-roll video ads in videos of 90 seconds or longer, hence the reason for favoring longer videos in the news feed.
Pro Tip: Use your video views to create a custom audience and retarget with future posts.
Create a Mix of Post Types
You can deliver content on Facebook in a number of different ways, including video, slides, photos, and text. While some people may prefer (and therefore share) your photos, users who are pressed for time might be more likely to share a text post. Mix up your post types and you’re more likely to attract views from a variety of users.
Repost Popular Posts
Identify content that received a lot of attention the first time you posted it on Facebook. Then repost it to capture the attention of people who didn’t see it the first time and give users who did a chance to revisit it and share it again.
Use Organic Audience Targeting
If you have specialized content that’s more likely to be of interest to a specific type of Facebook user, use Facebook’s Audience Optimization tool to choose a more friendly audience for that content.
To access this tool from your page post composer, click the…
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