Ways On How To Increase Your Facebook Organic Reach

Facebook’s organic reach is down and it’s a lot harder for fans or followers to see your posts these days.

But, it’s not impossible.

And today we are going to walk through what organic reach is, why it’s in decline, the biggest tips you can use to immediately increase your Facebook organic reach on your business page, and the things you need to stay away from that will hurt your reach.

What is Organic Reach?

Organic reach is simply the number of people you can reach for free on Facebook by posting to your page.

Here are our top 3 ways you can increase your Facebook organic reach:

1. The first thing you can do to boost your organic reach is to post more videos on Facebook.

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook could be mostly video by 2021 and we are definitely seeing the effects. In a recent Social Bakers study, they found that videos reach 135% more users organically than images.

But Facebook doesn’t just want you to post any video to their platform, they want you to post native videos.

Native videos mean those videos that are directly uploaded to Facebook and not via a share from a third-party such as YouTube.

According to Search Engine Journal, native videos reach 2x more people, receive 3x more shares, and get 7x more engagement.

In short, if you are going to post a video to Facebook, make it native.

Here are a few tips for better video posts:

a. Add captions to your videos. 85% of Facebook users watch videos with the sound off.

b. Create an engaging thumbnail. Like on YouTube, your thumbnail can be the deciding factor whether someone watches.

c. Grab attention in the first 5 seconds of the video via motion. Videos can autoplay and be muted so you have to have a pattern interrupt included that will stop someone from scrolling.

2. The second thing you can do to boost your organic reach is to increase your post frequency.

The more content you post, the more opportunities you have to reach your followers.

The caveat though is to increase frequency without decreasing quality.

The algorithm still favors posts that Facebook deems high-quality – aka posts that are more likely to get engagement.

3. The third thing you can do to boost your organic reach is to have your followers add you as a Favorite.

Most people don’t know this but followers can actually select to “Favorite” the businesses they like the most so that their posts show up higher in their news feed.

Here’s how they can do this:

1. They visit your page
2. Tap the 3 dots on the top right
3. Click Follower Settings
4. And Click “Favorites” under the “News Feed” Category.

This will instantly give you a boost in reach by letting the algorithm know your posts are important to them. Encourage your followers to adjust their follower setting for your business so you show up in their news feeds.

3. The third thing you can do to boost your organic reach is to boost your post.

We mentioned before that Facebook favors posts that get engagement. A quick way to get engagement on a post is to advertise it to your followers and to people who have not heard of your brand at all.

A share or tag that comes from a boosted post automatically increases the organic reach of that post as organic users start to see it and share, comment, and like it as well – leading to other organic users seeing it – and the process repeating itself.

We’d suggest having a budget set aside to boost your posts but to not blow the entire budget on one post or two posts.

Instead come up with a system where you boost a certain amount of posts per week for a certain amount per month.

This strategy will help you to continue to reach more of your followers, introduce your brand to a new audience and amplify your overall reach.

Things to Avoid That Will Hurt Your Reach

Those are the three things to do to help your organic reach. On the other hand, here are three things to avoid as they negatively impact your organic reach.

1. The first thing to avoid is something Facebook calls Like-baiting.

“Like-baiting” is when a post explicitly asks for a like, comment or share which results in an unnatural increase in reach.

Here’s a blatant example of Like-baiting and something you should not do:

Facebook has said that posts containing baiting will not be shown more prominently than other posts but pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, and focuses will not be affected.

The call-to-action for your content strategy is to encourage discussion but it’s not ok to blatantly attempt to get engagement without providing value via the post.

2. The second thing to avoid is posting content that has been posted by others repeatedly.

We’ve all seen a post on Facebook that has been re-posted by what seems like everyone.

If you are looking to use this strategy, think again.

Facebook de-emphasizes Pages that continue to post content that has been posted repeatedly.

The call to action for your content strategy is that originality can help you reach audiences, copying won’t. Literally.

Aim to create high-quality and original content at all times.

3. The last thing to avoid is links that are considered spammy.

Spammy links are links that lead people from Facebook to a website that is mostly ads or unoriginal content and ads.

Posts that contain links that do not provide value to those who click will perform poorly in the newsfeed.

The call-to-action for your content strategy is to only link to original and helpful content within your posts when including links.

Takeaways

So there you have it, an overview of Facebook Organic Reach and the Do’s and Don’ts to help you increase your organic reach.

Let’s recap so you can get started increasing your reach immediately!

First, we learned that organic reach is simply the number of people you can reach for free on Facebook by posting to your page. This is something you can find by looking at your Facebook Business Page insights.

Next, we learned that Facebook’s organic reach is declining for two reasons and a secret reason:

• competition,
• Facebook’s algorithms focuses on quality content, and
• the fact that declining organic reach means more revenue for Facebook

Then we discussed the three things you can do immediately to see greater organic reach on your Facebook posts:

• post native video,
• post more frequently without compromising quality, and
• to have your followers add you as a Favorite

And lastly, we discussed three things you should avoid that negatively hurt your organic reach:

• like-baiting,
• posting content that has been posted by others repeatedly, and
• spammy links

That’s all for now!

And if you want to get some help from the experts to increase the results you’re getting from your Facebook marketing, Digilab Marketing Agency got you covered. Check out our social media marketing services here or contact us today.