How to Boost Organic Reach on Facebook

Facebook has made it almost impossible to reach your audience organically. Or so they want you to think.

We started hearing about the decline of organic reach on Facebook around the end of 2013. By the beginning of 2015, pay-to-play became a necessity. You will not reach the same number of users organically as you will with cash but it is still possible to reach more than 1% of your followers. Don’t believe me? Here’s my story…

I started to really see the decline in organic reach a few months ago. My posts went from 100+ likes a day to barely 30. I was shocked, amazed and intrigued all at the same time. I took it as a challenge. Facebook wanted my money and I was greedy! I looked Facebook straight in the eye and said, I will beat you.

With some patience, determination and a little elbow grease I have grown my organic reach to almost 7%. If you don’t think that’s a lot, 7% of my audience factors out to just under 23k people. That’s 23,000 eye balls reading my post. 3% of those eyeballs click on it, coming out to 726 conversions to my website. That’s just one post. Hot damn!

The questions you MUST ask yourself in order to achieve organic success.

Do you know why they use social media? The other day I was having a conversation with one of the Design World editors on this topic. She said something that I already knew but hadn’t fully resonated until now, I think because I’ve had to work harder for any progress. Engineers use social media to learn something. Though you may not work in this industry, the same holds true for any target audience. What are they using social media for? Dive even deeper to find out how your TA uses each platform.

Are you asking the right questions? Or statements or call-to-actions or whatever it is that will convert your audience. I discovered that my audience responds to questions over any other type of post, even video. This all stems from knowing your audience. My TA comes to me to learn about engineering, so even if the post headline isn’t a question, I turn it into one in order to convert.

Have you scoped out the competition? Any professional will tell you to check out the competition. See what they are doing and do it better. This really is the easiest part of the process. There’s no excuse for not trying out what “they” do to see if it works for you too. I did…Scroll back up to my numbers.

Are you posting at the right time? There are a few parts to this question. First, it must be known that a Facebook post has a lifespan of 5 hours. The majority of your reach and engagement will occur within the first 2-3 hours. After that, you won’t see much spike unless you boost it. – that is, pay to get more reach – which we aren’t doing here.

Look at the Facebook Insights to find out when your audience is online. Pay close attention to the spikes and schedule around these time. If you post at the peak time and it’s not doing well, post the next a little earlier. Timing your posts requires some experimenting.

Are you willing to put in the extra work? If this answer is no, you’re in the wrong profession. Asides the fact that social media is a 24 hour gig, more than not after conducting your research and going through the steps, you’re going to discover that you need to put in more work to get more organic success. When it was all done, I changed my strategy from one post a day at peak time to five posts a day throughout the highest traffic hours for my page.

How have you tried improving your organic reach? Keep the discussion going @WTWH_Stacy