If you haven’t already heard, Facebook recently announced a re-focus of their News Feed algorithm which will see organic reach for Pages decline. That’s not great for businesses, however organic reach on Facebook has been falling for years now – so while this latest shift is still significant, it’s not overly surprising. Now you just need to work out how to offset the potential slowdown in Facebook referral traffic
And while Facebook ads are effective in increasing reach and engagement for businesses, that engagement needs to be supplemented by real, organic engagement – you need a level of interaction and reach to make best use of the platform.
In this post, we’ll look at a few ways to help you drive more organic Facebook engagement – but first, let’s take a moment to get a better understanding of how, exactly, Facebook ranks content in user feeds.
What affects Facebook reach?
While there’s a wide range of elements taken into account in Facebook’s algorithm, the key elements considered can be broken down into three categories: affinity, weight and decay.
- Affinity is a measure of how other Facebook users have interacted with a post.
- Weight is assigned based on the type of content. Facebook favors visual content.
- Decay is greater for older posts, which are less likely to appear in current feeds.
To increase your organic reach, and grow your following, you need to increase affinity and weight, and reduce decay.
Here are some tips on how to do it.
1. Find best time to post
Conduct an experiment to see on which days, and during which time intervals, your posts receive the most reach and engagement. You’ll invariably notice a pattern, and the more you understand about the existence of that pattern, the easier you’ll find it to build a relationship with your target audience.
For example, if your target group includes new parents, it’s useful to know that they’re often most active during early hours, when they’ve been woken by a crying baby.
Once you have an outline of the best time periods to post on different days, you can set-up a simplified publishing schedule on a social media management app such as DrumUp, which enables you to “1-click schedule” to previously set-up time intervals.
2. Tell stories
Storytelling makes marketing more bearable, and Facebook has a ton of features that you can exploit to tell stories in a beautiful and captivating manner.
Facebook Stories is one such feature – Facebook Stories are not saturated as yet and they give you the opportunity to appear on the top of users’ screens, above their feeds. Plus, if you’re already posting Instagram Stories, cross-posting on Facebook will take no effort on your part.
There are so many types of content suited for publishing via Stories, including promotional content, behind-the-scenes sneak peaks and even consumer-research insights. Since Stories expire every 24 hours, you can also use them to run limited period offers.
3. Conduct Q and A Sessions
Questions increase fan engagement. People want to be heard, and questions enable such interaction.
You can ask your fans about absolutely anything, from their experiences with your brand to what they expect from a product like yours. You can plan what to ask based on what you want to achieve via the activity – alternatively, you can also set-up an Ask Me Anything (AMA) to encourage your fans to share their queries.
You can even convert the AMA into a Facebook event and have interested people RSVP.
If you don’t have ideas for questions, you can source them from communities like Quora or tools like FAQFox, which lets you search multiple websites for questions containing your search keywords.
4. Collaborate and Guest-Curate
Collaboration with popular Pages can give you a boost when building your Facebook audience.
There are multiple ways to collaborate with other Pages, but you first need to identify non-competing Pages that cater to your industry. Once you have, you can either co-create social media content or offer to curate content for those Pages in exchange for credit.
Content co-creation can be done via co-hosted online events, contests or co-created videos or simple Facebook posts. The extra exposure you get via collaboration can help you find and make an impact on new segments of your target groups.
Here’s an example of how GoPro and RedBull collaborated on an event.
5. Embed Facebook Posts
If your company already has a blog with a healthy subscribership, you can convert those subscribers into Facebook fans. All that requires is a simple embedding of your Facebook posts on relevant blog posts.
If you haven’t tried embedding Facebook posts before, it’s very simple – you copy the embed code from the Facebook post and added it to the HTML of your blog. On WordPress, you can even add the URL directly in the text editor. Website visitors can then interact with embedded posts, thereby increasing engagement on those posts.
Wrapping Up
An organically grown Facebook fanbase is more likely to convert, because it’s made-up of stronger leads. Organically acquired fans are also more likely to last longer and add more value to your business. With the tips outlined here, you can begin your journey of more effective organic Facebook marketing today.