In this post, you will learn about a technique I’ve used to increase the organic reach of a Facebook Business Page by 40% without changing my publishing frequency or post types.
Before getting into the details of what I did and how you can replicate my steps to do the same, let me say that while there are some great guides out there that talk about Facebook organic reach, all of them explain how to grow your reach by concentrating on the content aspect of your posts.
There is nothing wrong with that; it’s great advice and something I will also talk about in this post, but there is another way to increase your Facebook organic reach to generate results faster and in a shorter period.
Facebook Organic Reach 101
Everybody in the social media marketing world is trying to increase the number of followers (fans) for their business pages so that they win the social proof game.
I have also written a case study explaining how to get your first 10,000 fans on Facebook. The Facebook page used in the case study now has more than 110K followers.
Besides winning the social proof game, you need to have many followers on your business pages for many other reasons, including the organic reach of your posts.
In simple terms, Facebook's organic reach is the number of people who will see your new posts in their timelines without promoting them through advertising.
In an ideal World, the greater the number of followers, the greater the number of people who will view your post. On Facebook, this is not quite true.
As you can see in the graph below, the average organic reach of a ‘normal’ Facebook page has been declining steadily since 2013, with some studies showing that the reach in 2016 was no more than 4%.
The percentage for popular Facebook pages (with more than 500K likes) is even smaller. In other words, more than 95% of your audience (in a best-case scenario) will never see your posts!
Source: Ogilvy
So, it’s obvious that if you want to increase your reach, you have to either use Facebook’s advertising system or find ways to reach more people organically or both.
Why is organic reach declining?
According to Facebook, there are two main reasons:
First, too much content is being shared, making viewing everything in the user’s timeline impossible.
Second, Facebook is trying to show content that is most relevant to the users by avoiding spam and content that makes no sense to them.
Of course, they give more reasons to justify their decision, but what we are most interested in at the moment is understanding how they distinguish content that is thought to be relevant to a user so that it shows in their news feed. The answer is found in the Facebook ranking algorithm.
The Facebook Ranking Algorithm
The Facebook ranking algorithm is a set of rules the system uses to decide what to show in the user’s timeline. It also determines the order of results when people use the search function on Facebook.
It is similar to the Google or Bing ranking algorithm in that it is automated, has hundreds of parameters, and is kept secret. For obvious reasons, the company does not reveal what is included in the algorithm and how ranking decisions are made.
Why do we care about the Facebook Ranking Algorithm? For a very simple reason. By understanding how the algorithm works, we can optimize our Facebook page and posts for more exposure (both organic and paid).
It’s like doing SEO for Google but in a slightly different way. As you will read below, there are things to optimize on a post level and techniques you can use that go beyond posts and content.
Understanding the Facebook Ranking Algorithm
Wallroomedia has a nice post that outlines all the changes made to the FRA since 2004. While reviewing all the changes is good, we are mostly interested in the changes made in January and February 2016.
Audience Optimization Tool: This change was introduced in January 2016, allowing Facebook page owners to set their ‘Preferred Page Audience’.
When you go to PAGE SETTINGS and click PREFERRED PAGE AUDIENCE, you will see options to select Locations, Age, Interests, and Language.
It’s similar to defining your target audience for ads, but the purpose of this tool is to help Facebook show your posts to people who are more likely to find your posts interesting, thus increasing the chances of interacting with your content.
Tip: Before deciding on what to enter as your ‘preferred audience’, go to INSIGHTS and then PEOPLE to see and understand your current audience and compare their characteristics with the audience you would ideally have for your page (based on your business goals).
Don’t think that ‘Preferred Audience’ will restrict the number of people that will view your posts, but approach this as a way to get your posts to the people that matter, even if their audience size is smaller in numbers.
Engagement Probability: In February 2016, Facebook introduced another change to further improve the user experience by showing them posts that can increase the probability of interaction, i.e., liking, commenting, or sharing.
Some of the factors that can have a positive effect on the ‘probability of interaction’ and also increase your likelihood of increasing your organic reach are:
- The Type of post (based on past user’s interaction with the same post type)
- When a post is published
- User’s past experience with the page where the post is published
- Popularity of the post (in general)
- Popularity of a post among people that can influence your decisions (i.e., your Facebook friends)
To make it easier to understand and ‘convince’ Facebook to show your posts to more fans organically, your posts must satisfy the above rules, especially the ones in italics.
In other words:
- A user who interacts with one of your posts now is more likely to see another post from you in the future (user’s experience).
- Your posts need to have a lot of likes (Popularity of the post).
- Your posts should be popular among people who connect with your fans, i.e., their friends. (influencers).
If you still have questions about what I’m getting into, keep reading to learn how the above guidelines can be applied.
How to Increase Facebook Organic Reach
STEP 1: Make sure that you have enough Fans on your Business Page
You need a good base to work on, so having many followers on your Facebook page is important. If you don’t have at least 20K-30K, this method's benefit will not be big enough.
If you are not yet in this range, the best way to gain more followers is to use Facebook ads and target the most likely to follow your page.
This involves paying Facebook for this service, but as we will see later, the benefits justify the costs since you can target a larger audience organically.
STEP 2: Use Facebook ‘Boost Post’ to get your posts in front of people that matter (read this part)
This is the most important step of this technique. We will use Facebook's ‘Boost Post’ to get our posts in front of more people, but not all people.
At this stage, we don’t want to reach anyone even if it meets the criteria of our target audience, but we want to go after our Fans and their friends.
Let me explain why.
Your posts will get more likes – Users are already fans of your page and are more likely to LIKE, SHARE, or COMMENT on a post from a page they follow, so your posts will be popular.
Facebook Algorithm gets the right signals. Promoting your post to your fans and their friends (who are not necessarily your fans) and getting interactions from those 2 groups dramatically increase the ‘engagement probability,’ which also benefits your future posts.
Facebook will start noticing that your fans and their friends share your posts, eventually increasing your Facebook's organic reach for new posts.
This is what you have to do:
Ensure you already have 20K-30K fans on your Facebook Business page.
Make sure that you publish a new post at least once per day.
Every week, choose 2-3 of your best posts and use BOOST POST to target ‘People who like your Page and their friends’. You don’t have to spend a fortune; $5 per post is enough.
Experiment with different post types (images, videos, titles, etc.) to find out which get the most interactions and promote those more.
Follow this for a few months, and stop promoting your posts. Keep publishing posts regularly.
Analyze the results: Go to INSIGHTS, select REACH, and compare your organic post reach for different periods. Check and examine your organic reach before using ‘Boost Post’, during that period, and after.
My tests showed a significant increase (almost 40%) in organic reach in all periods, especially after doing the ‘boost post’ for a few months.
7 More Ways to Increase the Organic Exposure of Your Posts
As mentioned above, you need to publish good content on your page for this or any other method to work. Otherwise, no one will like or share it, even if you pay $$$ in Facebook ads.
On my page, I publish the same type of posts (title, image, description), so I cannot comment on whether other types of posts (e.g., Videos) could do better. However, I can safely share the following tips to help you increase the organic exposure of your posts.
#1 - Publish content that is relevant regardless of when you read the post
In Digital Marketing, this is referred to as evergreen content. Evergreen content is relevant to people who will read it when it’s published and those who will read it in three months or a year.
Take a look at the screenshot above. The post covering an ‘evergreen subject’ organically did well and received many likes.
Tip: I have written a detailed guide here on how to use evergreen content to increase your traffic.
#2 - Publish on dates/time that are most likely to bring more engagement
I use Buffer to manage my Facebook posts, and I schedule them to go live during the morning hours. I find that I get more interactions if I post between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m.
Many studies can give you some guidelines, like this study from Coschedule (screenshot below), but the best way to find out is to look at your insights and experiment with different dates/times.
#3- Less (postings) - generate better results
Regarding posting frequency, it is important to post daily, but you don’t have to cross the line. Respect your audience; otherwise, if you try to overwhelm them with the same type of posts multiple times a day, you will generate the opposite results.
A study by sotrender concluded that Facebook business pages that publish more than 2-3 times per day experience a decrease in both organic reach and engagement.
#4 - Take advantage of your profile
As stated many times above, one factor that can help increase your organic reach is engagement with posts from your friends.
It makes more sense for a friend to share or like an article from a friend’s timeline than from a business page.
To take advantage of this, make sure that as soon as you post something on your business page, you also share it from your page.
Nowadays, everyone has a couple of hundred ‘friends’ on their profiles, and if you share something good and interesting with them, they will most probably like it, thus expanding your reach even more.
#5 - Use a maximum of 2 #hashtags per post
Unlike Instagram, people tend to like many hashtags on a post. A recent study by social bakers showed that the optimum number of hashtags for Facebook posts is no more than 2.
With this in mind, there is no reason why you should use more.
# 6- Use the Audience Optimization Feature
I have shown you how to enable the ‘audience optimization tool’ on the page level and target a specific audience whenever you publish a new post.
What you can do on a post level is to use post targeting and choose (or restrict even more the target audience per post).
Before hiding the PUBLISH button, click targeting and enter several tags in the ‘Interests’ field.
As Facebook states, interest tags don’t limit a post’s reach; they help it reach a more relevant audience.
#7 – Promote your posts on other platforms
Don’t just rely on Facebook alone; use other ways to increase the exposure of your Facebook posts. For example:
Share the post with your email subscribers: One advantage of having many email subscribers is that they can help you promote a post organically.
As soon as you publish a post on your website, send a newsletter and ask your subscribers to share the post (if they find it useful) on Facebook.
Share the post on other social networks with a strong presence: Maybe you have more followers on Twitter, Instagram, or G+; take advantage of those followers by asking them to share your Facebook post.
Optimize social sharing on your website: Test and ensure that when someone clicks the SHARE button from your blog post page, the post is optimized for sharing, i.e., it has the right image, title, and content.
Conclusion and takeaway message
Facebook page management is a time-consuming task. There are so many things to do and check daily that require a lot of time and knowledge.
Thus, it is important to automate your tasks as much as possible and use techniques that are easy to implement and can generate measurable results quickly. If you have the budget, you can hire someone else to do it for you.
The abovementioned technique can help you increase your organic reach by 40% or more.
The idea is simple: you use Facebook ads (Boost Post) to increase engagement with your posts from your fans (and their friends).
When you do this several times, Facebook will recognize that your fans interact with your posts (a strong signal in the Facebook algorithm) and show your future posts organically to more of your fans.
This technique, together with the other methods outlined above, i.e.
- Publishing evergreen content
- Time of posting
- Frequency of publishing
- Using a maximum of 2 hashtags
- Sharing the posts with your friends
- Experimenting with the audience optimization feature
- Promoting your Facebook posts on other platforms
will certainly and easily increase your Facebook organic reach without spending too much time on tasks or practices that are uncertain if they work or not.