I talk to a lot of business owners who rely heavily on social media platforms like Facebook to engage with their customers and drive traffic to their sites.
This is great, as social media is an important component of your digital marketing strategy. However, over the past couple of years, many of these business owners have seen a drastic reduction in Facebook’s ability to reach their customers. This comes as no surprise, as Facebook experts have openly commented on the decline of organic reach.
Want proof? Check out this case study from EdgeRank Checker and Social@Ogilvy:
A study from Edgerank Checker found that between February 2012 and March 2014, organic reach for the average Facebook Page dropped from 16% to 6.5%. Research from Social@Ogilvy suggests that organic reach for a Facebook Page with more than 500,000 likes, could be as low as 2%.
It’s clear that Facebook’s organic reach has been declining since about 2014. So if you’re a business owner who has spent significant time and money building fans/likes on your Facebook Page and your organic reach is now next to nothing, what are the best ways to share your content?
Here are three strategies that you can implement to expand your content reach.
1. You’ve Got to Pay to Play
For the first few years, Facebook’s marketing strategy focused on acquiring as many users as possible to build an enormous user base. During this period, marketers could get their content in front of Facebook’s vast user base for free. This all started to change around the end of 2008 when Facebook started to focus on scaling its advertising products.
That’s really when Facebook went from being a free social network to a digital advertising juggernaut. At this point, Facebook had to start generating more revenue via its advertising platform (which really started to develop after 2008). After acquiring all these users, they had to find some way to monetize the platform, right?
Facebook achieved this by monetizing its user base. Content providers are now required to pay to advertise on the platform. This is an advertising model that hasn’t changed from the print, TV, and radio days. Basically, if you want your content to get the most reach, you’re going to have to take advantage of all of Facebook’s paid advertising tools.
So if you’ve already built a really solid user base on your Facebook age and you want to reach the majority of those folks, you’ll need to allocate marketing dollars to Facebook ads. Yes, it does suck that you spent all that time and money to build your Facebook audience and now you have to spend more money to reach them again, but there are still very few platforms that allow you to cost-effectively reach an extremely targeted audience at scale. Paying to play when it comes to content reach on Facebook is the new normal, and we all need to get used to it.
2. Include a Call to Action on ALL Your FB Posts
Facebook’s algorithm accounts for the amount of engagement your posts get. The more engagement your posts get, the better chance you have to increase their reach.
To boost engagement, put a clear call to action on every piece of content you post. Your call to action could be a simple question, such as: “Did you like this post? Let us know what you liked in the comments below!.” Or: “Know someone who might find this post useful? Tag them in the comments below or hit share!”
Not only does this give you the benefit of getting more social equity on your posts, but it will increase their organic reach.
3. Share More Native Video Content
Facebook has made it very clear that they’re becoming a platform that’s focused on video content. They’re trying to compete with the traditional networks like NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, etc. And to encourage people to publish more video content, Facebook is prioritizing video over all other forms of content. Check out this graphic from Social Bakers:
It's important to note that you should be posting NATIVE video content on Facebook. This means that you shouldn’t be publishing your video content to sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and then embedding the link in your Facebook posts. This is exactly what Facebook DOESN’T want--to have you leave the Facebook ecosystem for a competitor. According to Quintly, the engagement rate for native Facebook videos is 304% higher than for YouTube videos posted to Facebook. So focus on native content on Facebook if you want to get the most reach and engagement.
To post native video content, you should upload the original video file directly to Facebook. You can also use the Facebook Live feature to create native video content on the platform. The key is to make sure that you’re keeping your fans inside the Facebook ecosystem and that they’re watching all your video content natively on Facebook.
Conclusion
Facebook has evolved a lot over the past decade or so, and marketers have had to shift their social media strategies to adapt. One thing is for certain: Posting on Facebook is no longer as easy as coming up with a picture and some text to achieve maximum organic reach. You’re going to have to come up with a coherent content strategy that adequately addresses the algorithm’s preference for paid advertising and video content.
Have you developed any of your own strategies to amplify the organic reach of your content on Facebook? We’d love to hear from you!
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