Expand Your Facebook Reach
Building, maintaining and growing your social media success isn’t easy. Social media is not as effective as Google or Bing search engines in creating free organic traffic.
However, under certain conditions, Facebook can generate a lot of traffic to your website, and allow you to reach much bigger audiences.
Facebook Ranks and Filters Posts
They do this for a few reasons we’ll discuss below. What their newsfeed filter blocking mechanism does is limit the exposure of your Facebook posts. Frustratingly, they might not be seen by your connections or anyone who uses Facebook.
This blocking of many posts means business people including software companies, real estate agents, ecommerce store owners, and others must instead must pay for advertising. The squeezing of small business people this way has been wildly profitable for Facebook.
Some business people now feel Facebook isn’t relevant as customer nurturing tool.
To avoid draining your marketing budget to reach your connections, you should research some strategies and tactics to “beat the Facebook blocking algorithm.”
What is the Post Blocking Algorithm?
The Facebook algorithm is a ranking system or filter that Facebook uses to decide which posts users see when they login and view their newsfeeds.
Over the past few years, the blocking of posts has increased exponentially.
Facebook Newsfeed is a Simple Search Engine Ranking System
FB’s feed algorithm is a simple ranking system. Being seen in your FB connection’s news feed is how you reach them and stay in touch. The big issue is that for a variety of reasons, Facebook has really cut back on exposure for many users. They are likely trying to reduce spammy, bandwidth-eating, low quality posts that were being ignored anyway, and to move free-loading corporate marketers off of their platform, and make them buy Facebook ads.
There is little you can do to directly affect the feed, other than mute friends, unfriend them, and others posts. Facebook controls the feed with a little feedback from you based on what you do.
Although there is a limit on how many friends you can have on Facebook, there is no limit to how many people can follow your page. So there’s a lot of reasons to take organic growth seriously and get these followers (or brand ambassadors).
4 Key Reasons They Reduced Organic Friend Reach
There are 4 reasons why organic reach on Facebook continues to decrease and why most companies are forced to advertise via Facebook ads.
- there is much more content/posts being published (billions every month)
- Facebook wants to limit business’s organic posts to get them to spend on paid ads
- content has to be very relevant to user’s actual observed interests (not potential interests)
- there is quite a bit of spam and low quality content ruining user’s experience
From Facebook’s point of view, a certain percentage of shared posts are irrelevant and they can see that based on recipient or viewer’s actions. The Facebook ranking algorithm ranks posts and whether they will appear in users feeds.
If you’re only reaching 40 of your 2500 connections, then you’re not meeting Facebook’s algorithms expectations of quality and relevance. And you may not have been engaging with your connections recently thus Facebook will not show your posts to them.
Spending more Time Engaging with Your Connections
The key is to find a way to engage with more of them. Of course, this requires a lot of time and it takes a strategy. Contacting people without a good reason could result in negative results. You should refer to your digital marketing strategy and your overall social media strategy, for your objectives and the content you’ll need.
Here’s one way you can increase friend’s interest in your posts and get through the Facebook newsfeed filter. Segment your friends into relevant groups. You can segment them by city, by profession, or common activities. Examine what your network typically comments about and what kind of work they do.
Remember that most people use Facebook for personal and family reasons. It was never meant to be a work or marketing tool. By pushing business, we’re going against the spirit of the social media network. Always skew your posts so they’re relevant in a personal context.
Engagement is the big buzzword today, on Google and on Facebook. This isn’t something AI marketing software can do for you nor will social media scheduling software either. Do some brainstorming flow charts to help you get focused on what your Facebook friends care about. That’s your starting point.
Facebook Newsfeed Relevance Score
Relevance score is important in the FB newsfeed algorithm. It’s believed to go like this:
- what topics are your friends posting?
- how is it written? (promotional wording gets tagged)
- how often are they posting?
- what are the typical number of comments, likes and shares
- has the user liked the posters page and previous posts?
- how often have the engaged with the posters page?
- negative feedback on similar posts
- what keywords are they using?
- who posted the post?
- how likely are people to comment on the post?
From these 4 items, Facebook’s algorithm ranks whether it’s worth it to show in their feed.
Facebook tightened the post ranking algorithm. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced an overhaul of the algorithm which identifies and favors relevant content and meaningful social interactions.
Facebook claims the new emphasis is on personal content and a desire for social good. That was Facebook’s foray into censoring content, something that Zuckerberg is under fire for now as he faces anti-trust and anti-competitive charges from the DOJ and state attorneys.
21 Ways to Grow your Facebook Organic Reach
- develop a social media content strategy that reflects what your audience is interested in, not what you sell
- use social listening tools such as Hootsuite to listen in on what your audience is doing on Facebook
- create a viral social media strategy so you’re pushing the envelope on reach
- share popular posts and other popular content (FB is more favorable to it and they like good content being shared)
- segment your audience into comprehensible groups so you can target topics to each that will get seen
- use original video that engages visitors and gives them a reason to revisit the video
- post often and use hashtags and keywords
- post in a way that offers value — contests, giveaways, whitepapers, case studies, infographics
- post in a way that sounds personal and avoid hype and sensationalism
- avoid posting uninteresting material and don’t use clickbait headings and spammy links
- avoid posting too frequently, links that take the user to another site outside of Facebook
- offer credible, informative news stories with “transparent authorship”
- using @ symbol, mention some of your connections or top social media influencers in your field
- spend more time engaging and messaging directly with connections and responding to their posts
- use people and faces in your posts
- post and respond to others posts in a way that sparks conversations — it begs/invites a response
- avoid asking for likes, clicks or comments
- avoid using banned words, profanity, and words like twitter, linkedin, whatsapp, etc.
- link to your Facebook page from your blogs and ask visitors to follow your page
- review your post and page metrics in Facebook
- examine your Google analytics to see traffic from Facebook and if visitors are engaged in your web content
- boost your posts and do FB ads to make you or your company and brand more familiar to your audience
Think Like a Brand
Think like a brand but act like a friend. Do users hate companies and brands? Not when the brand becomes a friend. You rarely block or reject a brand you really like and believe in.
The real power in social media is building a personal or company brand that people really enjoy hearing from. It’s about creating a good experience for thousands of people, which will grow to tens of thousands if you manage your strategy well.
It takes, time, creativity, strategy, and a desire to really connect with people. That means a big commitment. You’ll find that most marketers struggle with organic social media, and mostly because they can’t slow down to do it right.
Additional posts:
sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-algorithm/
blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/
How to Get Started?
Consult with Gord now about your digital marketing goals. Call 416 998 6246. Start your journey with a digital marketing audit, to establish what you have, what your market is and where the opportunities are.
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