How to grow your Facebook audience organically

Boosting organic growth on Facebook is becoming increasingly difficult.The algorithm changes constantly, reducing organic reach among your fan page audience. If you have big marketing budgets it might not be an issue. However, many smaller organizations have faced difficulties managing their Facebook pages, major issues being small budgets for online campaigns and lack of a proper Social Media team that could dig into the complicated world of Facebook tactics. Tooploox has experienced a rapid growth over past years . We’ve moved from doing Facebook part-time, to having a diverse marketing team that works together on the entire content. We’ve learnt a lot during this process and here are some tips on how to improve your organic reach and engagement on a Facebook page.

Analyze your goals

It might sound like an obvious thing to do, but believe me, not many companies ask themselves “Why exactly do we need a Facebook page?”. The answer doesn’t have to have a form of a nice slogan, it should have a practical value. Do you want to sell a product or service? Do you want to show your company as an exceptional workplace? Think carefully about those questions, answering them is salient in developing all the next steps. We’ve decided to focus on Employer Branding, show developers community what kind of projects we do, how we work and what sort of working environment our office is.
This leads to the second crucial topic: your audience.

How to understand your audience?

Everyone will tell you that you need to understand your audience. It’s not as easy as it may seem, basic Facebook analytics gives you only some information about demographics and also offers a very limited insight into what your followers like.

Since we use facebook mainly for Employer Branding and creating brand awareness, we figured out that we can overcome this problem by creating content tailored for our own employees. First of all, they are a representative group of our target audience so if they share company content voluntarily, it means it might be attractive for similar people. Another important advantage is that when your own employees react (by likes and shares) to company posts it improves those posts’ position in your audience’s newsfeed. This is a key factor, and potentially a game changer for your page.

Use micro-budgets to boost your posts

Indeed, in order to perform well on Facebook, you have to pay for ads. The sooner you accept this, the better. The good news is that you don’t need a huge budget to improve your reach. We have experimented with micro-budgets to boost posts that already do well without paid promotion (reach at least 40% of our followers).

Just publish whatever you think is good content, wait, check the reach and boost with some money. Make sure you create proper groups for your ads. For each post you decide to promote, think about demography, hobbies, job position etc.

Do you need a great variety of content?

You don’t have to produce a crazy variety of content, especially if you’re short on resources (time, money, manpower). You needn’t produce every possible type of content either. It’s way better to focus on what your company can produce organically. It’s also worth to add some external posts to your feed, you don’t have to share each Techcrunch post, though- there is a big chance that your audience has already seen it.

Here are the types of content we create:

• Blog post promotion
• “Lifestyle” content showing company culture (photos from events, office life)
• Facebook events (your own and external)
• Job offers
• Videos (this type of content can do wonders to your reach)

This may seem too obvious but be patient. Reaching your audience is a long process but sticking to a strategy will eventually pay off!

How it worked for us

We have just started to evaluate our Facebook strategy carefully and we are aware that we have barely scratched the surface of all the possibilities that Facebook provides. Nevertheless, we are happy to have an avg. of 5% engagement (while typical is less than 1%) and an avg. 70% of organic reach (while typical is around 10%). These are good results for a page that has doubled the number of followers over the past year reaching 1k followers. The numbers are different for different types of posts, with videos reaching the widest audience. We spend 30$-70$ per month, depending on the content we have, following a rule that the most attractive content gets bigger budget.

What’s next?

Recently we’ve started working with Data Science team to optimize our Facebook posts. Soon we’ll share the results of this cooperation. Stay tuned for more!
P.S. if all of the above fails use cats memes!