Two Ways to Boost Your Engineering Content Reach on Facebook

 

Focusing on distribution is a great way to make sure that you earn a return on your content investment. In
addition to other social media channels, Facebook can be an important part of the engineering marketer’s distribution strategy.

 

Why use Facebook to reach engineers?  Mostly because of the volume of inventory.  That volume can make up for the fact that marketers consider Facebook to be a less valuable audience platform than Linkedin, Youtube or Twitter (according to the ENGINEERING.com 2015 marketer survey).

 

This post breaks down two keys to maximizing your reach on Facebook. 

 

1. Pay attention to the algorithm changes at Facebook.

Facebook is continuously changing its algorithms. To ensure your audience keeps seeing your content, you’ll want to stay on top of the latest updates.

In April 2016, Facebook announced that it tweaked their news feed so users would be more likely to see the type of posts they’d previously read and clicked on in the past.

More recently, Facebook tweaked its algorithm again and announced that it will be prioritizing family and friends’ posts in users’ news feeds. Company pages will have to fight even harder to gain users’ attention, and reach and referral traffic from Facebook will undoubtedly drop.

The positive spin on this is that as your fans engage with your posts, those posts will become prominent in your fans’ news feeds for their own networks to see. Reach and engagement are intertwined, and growing your engagement rate is one of the most important factors when growing your reach.  

The message here is that you can’t “set it and forget it” when it comes to your Facebook marketing budget or strategy.  You need to constantly reassess whether you are getting value for your investment.

 

2. Content marketers need to get serious about visuals.

Content with images gets 94% more views than content without images, according to research from marketer Jeff Bullas. Infographics are rising to the top as the Internet user’s preferred way to consume information.

Articles can be shared multiple times with different visuals to attract more readers. What kind of visuals can you offer? Photo galleries, infographics, GIFs, videos, interactive data-heavy web pages and slideshows are all ways that you can offer your content through a different lens for your readers.

Facebook isn’t the most natural place to identify engineers who are looking for work-related purchases.  But it can be powerful brand accelerator if you take the time to build it into your overall content marketing strategy. 

Thanks,

John