Towards the
end of the year 2013, Facebook gave millions of brands a “not so good” New Year
gift. Facebook changed its algorithm in such a way that brands observed a severe drop in the organic reach for their Facebook pages.
Facebook
bluntly ‘advised’ the brands to pay for ads if they want to reach out to ‘their
own’ fans. Social media marketers and page admins were obviously very unhappy
about this. To start with, brands already spent a lot of money in acquiring the
fans through ads in a hope to reach out to and engage with a wide array of
audience only to realize now that even to reach out to that audience, one would
need to pay extra.
Although promoting individual posts seem like an obvious option, we were trying to find out ways of increasing the organic reach of the page updates –
without having to pay ANY additional money to Facebook.
#1: Publish Text Updates
I know, I know
– the good thing about Facebook is the visual impact and it offers you opportunity
to attract attention of your fans through stunning visuals. But do you know
that a text update has more reach than an update with a picture? Engagement
might be low but the reach will surely be more.
I have
noticed that for some pages, the reach of a text status update is almost 1000%
more than a picture update! Can you beat that? Yes, it does sound very
irrational and illogical, but it is true. Try it!
#2: Publish Albums
Another
thing which has worked awesomely well for us is Facebook albums. Next time you
post a status update, include more than 1 image. Even if you include 2 or 3
images, you will see significant increase in the organic reach of your post.
You can
think of lot of creative ways of creating albums and reach out to more fans on
your page.
#3: Post frequently when the fans are online
Facebook Insights
is a real great thing which Facebook has introduced – provided you know how to
use it well. The Insights shows you the
time when your page fans are online. You can keep a note of that and post your
updates at that time.
You can plan to post multiple updates
in a day – at the time when your fans are online – and start seeing
more organic reach. The concept is simple, if you post your updates when the
fans are online, it is more likely to appear on their timeline and the fans are
more likely to interact with your updates (of course, your updates need to be
engaging)
Are there any more tips which
have worked well for you? Share the learnings – after all, social media is all
about sharing knowledge and learning from each other :-)
