Oh Please! Facebook’s organic reach is fine…
I am really fed up…in fact totally pissed off at the social media managers and entrepreneurs who constantly crib about Facebook reducing the organic reach of their pages. The reality is Facebook is the best platform for marketers, to have been invented ever.
I am consistently reaching over 20% of the audience of pages of my clients. Therefore, I know what I am talking about. While I use many tricks to ensure that my pages get a higher reach, I consider these two tactics as the most important reasons, why the pages I manage get a higher reach than others:
1. No selling: I don’t do any promotions or any selling through the pages I manage. Even if I am sharing a link to drive opt-ins, I promote the post.
I have reviewed over hundreds of top performing Facebook pages and analyzed over tens of thousands of Facebook posts. I have found out that posts with a link don’t perform as well as posts without them.
I know driving traffic to your website is important. But you should not share a link every time you create a story on Facebook. Period.
2. Audience is God: There is a saying “Customer is God”. Well, my God happens to be my audience. For me, what my audience is interested in more important than anything else. More important than even what I am selling.
So, how do I treat my God? This is what I am going to share with you in the rest of the blog: how to make your audience super-happy. If you follow the tricks I have shared below, I GUARANTEE you that the organic reach would increase with the very next status you share through your Facebook page. So stick with me.
Step 1: Stop begging. Run Ads.
Does your fan page have more than 1,000 fans? If not, then promote your page via Facebook Ads (and please don’t beg your friends to like your page; it DOESN'T work- because although they care about you, they don’t care about your business. In fact, they cause your page more harm than you can imagine. They “like” your page when you ask them to, because they can’t say no. But when they see your Page’s posts on their Newsfeed, they don’t engage. For obvious reasons of course- your business does not interest them. Which helps reduce the organic reach of your page down further, because that is how Facebook’s algorithms work. Better the engagement-reach ratio early on, higher is the organic reach of the post.)
When you are creating the ads, make sure that you budget and target in such a way that you have at least 1,000 likes from each geography.
If you have a low budget but you want to target a global audience, then start with only one geography. You can always add new geographies later by creating new ads.
Step 2: Connecting with your Audience:
Imagine you invited a guest over to your house for dinner. Would you consider your guests’ tastes? Of course, you would. Yet, I see thousands of pages share stories that fail to connect with their audience. Even big brands make this mistake. Here’s an example:
Goodness me! What were they thinking: do you honestly believe that McDonald’s fans really care about what it’s Vice President have got to say?
The success of your Page is depended on one thing: the connection between the story you tell and your audience. The weaker the connection, the lower the organic reach. It’s that simple.
You may wonder, how do you make the connection strong. That’s a thought in the right direction. I wouldn’t say it’s really easy to get the connection right. But it’s not difficult either. Especially when Facebook is building such powerful tools for marketers to ensure the connection between the audience and the story is not lost. Two of those tools are:
a. Audience Insight.
b. Interest Targeting
In this step we shall understand how Audience Insight works:
Although Audience Insights has been developed with the objective to help you create better ads, it is a great tool to understand your existing fan base.
To access Audience Insights, visit “Manage Ads” from your Facebook profile, then select the account name that you use to create ads. Once you have reached the page where all your campaigns are listed, look at the menu on the left side of the screen, under the account name. The fourth option from the top is “Audience Insights”. Once you click the option, you would see a page which looks similar to the image above.
While on the page, look on the left menu again. You would see options such as: Location, Age, Gender, Interests, Connections etc.
It’s time for action now:
Enter the geographic location you had chosen while creating the ads in the step 1.
Next, click on “Connections”. You shall see an option which says “People Connected To PAGE”. Enter the name of your page. As soon as you do, you would see that the Demographic data on the middle of the screen has changed. Now, click “Page Likes” on the menu on the center top of the screen. The option “Page Likes” is next to “Demographic”.
Once done, you would see a list of Top Categories: company, news/media, product/service etc. This category refers to the top interests of your fans in the Page. The more you explore “Audience Insights” the better you would know about your audience.
Step 3: Creating compelling posts
To me the characteristics of a compelling Facebook posts are:
a. Highly personalized.
b. Easy to view on the mobile.
c. Has an image preferably of 130*130 size.
d. Text on the image is clearly visible.
Gary Vaynerchuk has written at length about how your Facebook posts should be in his book “Jab, Jab, Jab…Right Hook”. I recommend it to you, esp. if you are a social media manager.
While b, c, and d are easy to define, I want to share with you what does personalization mean.
If your status is about YOUR BUSINESS, people will not engage easily. You see, people don’t give a shit about your business. You have to talk about them, their interests. You would have to be creative in writing stories, which subtly talks about your business in the context of their interests, which should be give the primary focus.
The problem is, obviously not all your fans are interested in the same things. Which is where “Interest targeting” comes in. Facebook now allows, you to share stories to sub-groups of your followers based on a range of categories like age, gender, relationship status as well as interest.
In the next few lines I have explained, how to use “interest targeting”:
Now, that you know a lot more about your audience after exploring audience insights, it’s time for the fun part: initiating conversations. Once you back to your Page to share a status, you would see a cross-hair as shown in the picture below.
Click the cross hair to select targeting. Note the “Select Targeting” drop down. Once you click the drop down, it will show you multiple options such as Gender, Relationship Status, Age, Interest etc. Click on “Interests”, which will show another drop down called “All Interests” (visible in the image above.) Click “All Interest” and you would see a pop-up with a field where you have to type the interests you want to target.
Typically, if I have to share one post, I would create three separate stories to target my followers in the top three sub-categories.
For instance, if more than 30% of the followers of my page are “Lakers” fan, I would talk about Lakers and add a subtle touch to the brand I am managing. Not only, I end up entertaining my audience with stories they want to see, but also I get the chance to remind them about the brand or the business the page is about. Try this now. I assure you that this trick will do wonders for your Facebook Page.
I am eagerly looking forward to seeing your results. If you have any questions regarding what I shared, or anything related to Facebook, please feel free to comment below.
Until next time, good luck! ☺
