In an era of declining organic reach, reaching the full potential on Facebook is not an easy task, especially when the social posts aren’t developing much traction.”Like us on Facebook” has become such a common phrase that it is quite hard to imagine the platform any other way. The potential audience Facebook caters to is massive. Every day, members of Facebook share over 4.75 billion items. Starting a FB page may be easy, but with the falling organic reach and engagement, growing a FB page can be challenging, but not unachievable. Social media marketing strategies designed by a reliable digital marketing services company can help in fine tuning your marketing tactics to increase exposure and boost FB organic reach.
What Exactly Is FB Organic Reach?
In simple terms, organic reach refers to the total number of people who view the content without paid distribution. It includes people who are shown your posts in their own feed or because their friends have interacted with you. However, attaining organic reach is not so simple. Between competitions from ads, viral posts from major accounts and constant changes to the platform’s algorithm, many marketers note that organic reach has been falling for years now. Further, the reach of the posts depends on their level of engagement – that is how many people like, react, comment, or share the post. The more engaging a post is, the higher will be its reach.
The fact is engagement rate on Facebook is going upward – monthly active users have increased to 2.93 billion in 2022 Q1 from 2.85 billion in 2021 Q1. Even though engagement rates are way up, organic reach is way down. And it is still on a rapid decline. On Facebook, the average reach of an organic page post is down to 5.2% in 2020 from 5.5% at the end of 2019.
Data from Facebook Trends shows that, in 2022, the average engagement trend for Black Friday advertising peaked in November at 0.12%. In 2023, FB engagement rate began to rise in March and reached a value of 0.04% in June, indicating a growing trend.
Why FB Organic Reach Continues To Decline
Here are some major reasons why FB organic reach continues to decline –
- More Content – More content is being created and published every day. It is estimated that every minute, more than 510,000 comments and 293,000 statuses are posted on Facebook. As a result, competition in News Feed (the place on Facebook where people view content from their family and friends and business) tend to increase. This makes it harder for any post to gain exposure in News Feed. In addition to the growth in content, people also like more Pages. So, with each new Page like, competition in News Feed increases even further.
- Personalized News Feeds – Facebook provides the most relevant content to each user. In order to increase engagement and optimize user experience, content is tailored to each user’s individual interests.
- Change in Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm – The Facebook algorithm decides which posts people see every time they check their Facebook feed and how these posts will show up. FB’s algorithm isn’t static; it is constantly changing. The algorithm uses thousands of data points to make its predictions about ranking signals such as like, react, comment, or share but not limited to this. Depending on what Facebook thinks users want to see, ranking signals have been added, removed, and importance adjusted, since 2006.
Top Ways to Increase FB Organic Reach
- Respond to mentions: Reacting to audience mentions on your Facebook page is a great way to increase audience interaction. When people are talking about you, whether you are a business or an influencer, they will value your response. You might miss certain social mentions because not everyone mentions you with tagging. It requires a media monitoring tool in order for you to participate in the conversation. Your preferred keywords are tracked by this kind of software on social media sites and other websites.
- Use appropriate hashtags: Gaining more visibility on Facebook requires an understanding of how to leverage trending hashtags. Posts are categorized by hashtags, which also help them be found by a larger audience interested in related subjects. By adding trending and pertinent hashtags to your posts, you increase the chance that people who are actively looking for or following those hashtags will notice them. Use of 1-2 hashtags can increase interactions, while using more than that reduces engagement, according to Post Planner.
- Hashtags have to be written with just one word, no spaces allowed.
- When it makes sense, use only one or two hashtags. Use a relevant topic that people can filter to locate more relevant conversations.
- Make your own hashtags that are exclusive to your business and pertinent to your audience, or use hashtags that are industry-specific.
- Make your evergreen material easily discoverable by using hashtags. Every hashtag that is used on Facebook generates a different URL. This implies that you can look for material with them.
- If popular topics are related to your brand, use hashtags related to those themes.
- To discover more popular hashtags associated with your particular tag, utilize resources such as Hashtagify.me.
- Within a hashtag, numerals are OK, but punctuation and special characters (such as $ and %) shouldn’t be used.
- Specify what you publish: We now know the significance of meaningful interaction. Always have a specific user in mind while writing a post. Additionally, only publish posts that you have carefully chosen because you believe your target audience will find them relevant and fascinating. This allows you to target a specific audience with every post you make on your company page, regardless of whether it is sponsored or not. Suppose your page is dedicated to online advertising. In this case, the pieces you should write should target those who are interested in digital marketing. Since the Facebook page is followed by individuals who are more interested in digital marketing than data science, the Facebook system will be able to determine that your page is relevant to the topic when you publish more content related to digital marketing.
- Manage how frequently you post: How frequently should you publish on your Facebook page? “As often as you can post quality content,” is the simple answer. This is critical to keep your Facebook page healthy. It needs your active participation to grow and thrive, but avoid posting too frequently that it becomes annoying. Also, avoid posting so seldom that your audience completely loses interest in you. Hubspot examined Facebook data from over 13,500 users to determine whether increasing the frequency of posts will aid companies in expanding their audience. They discovered that if a page with fewer than 10,000 fans posted more than once a day, the interaction per post decreased by 50%. This implies that your organic reach significantly decreases with each successive post. The best option is to limit yourself to one post each day or five posts per week.
- Post when people are online: Time is an important consideration when it comes to posting on Facebook. The news feed displays the most recent posts at the top. If your post appears at the top of your audience’s Facebook timeline while they are online, they are most likely to see it and interact with it. According to Coschedule between 1 and 4 PM is the ideal time to post on Facebook.They went so far as to further deconstruct it by weekday: On Saturday and Sunday, 12–1 PM, 1-4 PM Friday and Thursday and 3 P.M. Wednesday. The best times to get your post in front of as many people as possible are 1 PM, 3 PM, and 9 AM.
Though these are great places to start, remember that these might not always be the most effective times for your followers. To receive tailored recommendations regarding the ideal time to post in order to maximize engagement based on the behavior pattern of your page followers, check Hootsuite first. After adding your Facebook Business Page, choose “Best time to publish” under the Analytics menu. Here, you can choose the time to post on Facebook according to your personal following.
- Partner with influencer: One of the best marketing strategies for expanding your Facebook reach is to collaborate with influencers. Influencers are strong brand ambassadors because they have devoted followers who rely on their advice. A wider audience is exposed to your brand when influencers advertise your items or content on their Facebook profiles. Influencer partnerships can improve visibility and engagement as well as your brand’s legitimacy and genuineness.
- Steer clear of these errors: Posting engagement bait is not appropriate. Facebook postings that entice users to participate by liking, sharing, commenting, and taking other actions are known as engagement bait. This strategy is used to artificially increase interaction and gain more visibility on News Feed. Users shun spammy posts and content that uses engagement bait is demoted on Facebook.
- React baiting: Inviting responses to the post, such as “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.”
- Comment baiting is the practice of requesting precise responses from others in the form of words, figures, phrases, or emoticons.
- Asking readers to forward the post to their friends is known as “share baiting.”
- Asking someone to tag their friends is known as “tag baiting.”
- Asking individuals to cast their votes by means of shares, reactions, comments, or other representations of a vote is known as “vote baiting.”
- Focus on high-quality content: Reactions to your postings on Facebook drive your reach. Any action – liking, leaving a comment, saving, sharing, or clicking the link—counts. Basically, you’ll have more options to reach a wider audience the more people in your target demographic like and engage with your Facebook posts. The accuracy of your content is a crucial component as well. Facebook states that all of your posts must be “accurate and authentic.” The platform alerts users that they will be penalized for posting any of the following types of content:
- Click-bait enticing content
- Attention-grabbing
- Links to unsatisfactory websites
- Poor quality footage
- Deceptive encounters
- False information
- False communication
Posting reputable photos and verified facts will help you avoid being shadow banned and having your reach shortened. Avoid gossip and phony news.
- Participate in co-branded giveaways – Forging partnerships can help expand organic reach quickly to a much larger group of audience. For instance, influencer partnerships allow showcasing a brand in front of a large number of people. This is possible through an endorsement from an influential figure within the niche area. As influencer partnerships often span months or years, they can increase the reach for a longer period. Brand partnerships enable working with complementary companies to promote products together and grow brands simultaneously. By running co-branded giveaways or contests, you can drive substantial engagement while reaching exponentially more people. For example, a caption competition where users need to provide a funny subtitle to an image that gets posted can stimulate tons of responses and rocket the post to the top of the News Feed. However, make sure that the prize or giveaway is related to the brand so that you attract both entrants interested in products/services along with the reward. Secondly, encourage users to interact with the contest post, preferably by commenting. Motivating users to comment on the contest is the best way to show the Facebook News Feed algorithm that the content is engaging and thereby increase the organic reach.
Facebook is a great social media platform. With a current user base of 2.93 billion and still continuously increasing, FB needs to be a part of the business marketing channel. However, getting more organic reach on FB can be a challenging task. Therefore, it is extremely important to understand how reach operates as a metric and what can be specifically done to increase the overall engagement. Use the above strategies as a starting point to grab the attention of the target audience and maintain it long-term.
It is important to try new tactics and release great content. When using these tactics, it may take some time for the final results to appear. Remain calm and keep posting to figure out what works best for an FB page in the long run. Hiring the services of an organic SEO company can provide businesses with unique strategies that would help improve organic reach and engagement.
