With Facebook now exceeding two billion monthly active users and growing as well as an increase in advertising revenue, its little wonder that organic reach on Facebook has declined over the last few years.
Think about it, Facebook is a business with the main goal of generating profit (like most of us). They will prioritise paid content over organic as a result and Facebook has been open about this approach.
As a small business owner or startup, this kinda sucks.
When starting out, you generally don’t have a lot of budget available for paid advertising or even pay for an expert to help you out.
You rely a little more on your fan base when pushing out content. However, you are not able to reach them as effectively as you could a few years ago.
Before we get into the detail, take a moment to think about the objective of the platform you are using.
Google wants you to provide an answer that satisfies your audiences search intent, so web pages that best meet the search criteria will be ranked first.
Social platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, want you to drive engagement with your network (i.e. friends and fans). The higher the engagement, the higher the reach.
With that in mind, here are three simple hacks you to can implement immediately to increase your Organic Facebook Post Reach
Hack 1:
Ask a question that requires your audience to provide a Yes/No answer or ‘tag’ a friend response. You can turbocharge this hack by providing something of value, for example, a free digital giveaway.
This hack works well as it doesn’t require the audience to think too much when writing the response. If you ask the person to provide an answer that requires detail, most won’t bother.
The cool part is once the person has written the response, their network of friends and contacts usually sees that they have commented on your post.
The aim here is that the topic will then engage their network and so on. How many times have you seen this in your own Newsfeed where the most ridiculous post has thousands of comments and shares using this method?
I’ve seen this work extremely well where one company offered a free PowerPoint presentation template for people who commented Yes. This particular post had over 32,000 comments and thousands of shares. The best part I like about this post was that the audience also had to provide their email address to access the template.
Not only was the company getting free advertising, but they were also collecting a bunch of emails along the way. Pretty cool hey?
Hack 2:
When you receive a comment on a post, reply to it providing additional value as well as asking another question.
The aim here is to get the person to respond (heck someone else may even provide their 2 cents worth). This naturally leads to greater engagement with your post resulting in greater organic reach.
Hack 3:
This is one for local businesses and doesn’t need you to do anything on Facebook.
Place a flyer at the order counter giving a free upgrade if the person checks in on Facebook. For example, receive a free upgrade to a large coffee for every check-in. This will show up in the Newsfeed of their friends.
If the person is a regular customer and checks in every time they order, this will definitely help with awareness of your business. This method may even be a more effective way to promote your business than providing a loyalty card to the regular customer.
You could go even further and provide another ‘freebie’ by asking “tag a friend who should be joining you for your coffee”. Not only will your business be promoted to the friends of the person who checked in, but you have potentially doubled your reach by simply asking them to tag a friend.
Head over to our Facebook page and tag a person who should read this post or let our community know of your own organic Facebook reach hack.