Step by step on how to boost your organic reach on Facebook

Promoting your business on social networks is almost a rule to boost your sales and build brand awareness.

But have you noticed that the organic reach of your publications on Facebook is declining?

This is a common pain for those who work promoting posts on Facebook and there are several reasons that explain the decline in organic reach.

To contextualize, I’d like to mention two reasons that I consider the most relevant in this scenario.

1. The first is the sheer volume of content that is posted daily on social media. You have to compete for your followers’ attention with a variety of subjects, from different segments, and getting a “like” or a comment becomes a difficult mission.
2. The second reason is the most obvious one. Facebook makes money from paid ads. So, in a way, the social network wants you to notice the need to boost the posts.

It is worth remembering that investing in ads is important to increase your organic reach but it is definitely not the only way.

In this post, I’ll show you some tips and new content trends that will expand the organic reach of your Facebook page.

And you’ll see them right now:

Understand the Facebook algorithm

How does Facebook determine what appears in each user’s feed?

What kind of content is the most valued?

Which is more relevant: a post with a lot of likes or with a lot of comments?

To answer these questions, we need to understand the algorithm. It analyzes and determines what is more relevant to Facebook.

But, after all, what is the algorithm?

The Facebook algorithm is known as EdgeRank. It is a resource used to understand which post is the most relevant post for the user to see while they are accessing that social network.

Imagine that you are a fan of vintage cars and follow pages related to that subject, but on your feed there are only posts related to cooking. Would you keep on spending time there?

Probably not, right? So, EdgeRank filters the information it deems most important to appear for each user.

If the user accesses the content that they like best, surely, they will feel the urge to spend more time on the social network. And that’s what Facebook wants.

So, to improve the results of your business’ organic reach it is crucial to understand how EdgeRank works.

The rules of the algorithm change frequently, so my tip is that you keep yourself up-to-date.

In events and official documents, Facebook offers a lot of information about how the algorithm works.

The social network wants content creators to know what is relevant, in order for them to improve the posts they’ll share. Thus, users’ feed can become more and more attractive.

Once you understand EdgeRank better, you’ll have more ideas for your post. The next challenge is: what is relevant to my target audience?

Define your audience’s buyer persona

It is the buyer persona that indicates what type of content you should publish on your Facebook.

Understanding what the pains of your customer are and how your business can help them is key to a good digital marketing strategy.

Considering its importance, creating the buyer persona of your business is challenging and requires a lot of research.

The Facebook Audience Insights is a tool that helps you understand demographics and audience preferences.

However, it is important to stress that while it can give you some insights, it can also be used to induce public behavior. This is where a lot of people go wrong.

If all you do is to induce behavior, your Buyer Persona may become obsolete. That’s why it’s important to build it with data from real customers. In our blog, we’ve already talked about this in a practical guide.

Once you build the personas in your group, it will be to think about your page’s content.

But, first things first, think about the following question: what will be the trademark of my business on Facebook?

Build the digital reputation of your company

A Facebook page is a digital identity of your business. Having a good reputation online and offline is important for your brand and consequently, to increase your revenues.

That is why you must reflect on how your company will be perceived by the public on the Internet.

A practical example of strategy is to create an avatar who represents your business in social media. Great companies are doing so and the results they’ve come across are substantial.

If you don’t think this strategy makes sense for your business, don’t worry!

My tip – for any business in fact – it is to create an identity for the company. You can use the same methods you used in the previous topic.

It is important to reflect on what your business represents, the competitive advantages over other companies and the purpose of being present in social media.

To construct the identity of the business, you must decide what kind of language will be adopted, the visual identity of the page and the posts, the way you’ll interact with your audience. To sum up, you’ll have to think about everything that will be important to build a strong brand,

A strong and respected digital reputation in the market will contribute even further to educate your audience and to make you be seen as an authority on the niche. But, to do that, you need to focus on quality content targeted to your buyer persona.

Content planning

Up to here, you’ve learned how to set the persona and understand the importance of your digital business reputation. Now, it’s time to plan how to approach your audience.

Conversation. That’s exactly what your content should be focused on.

In social media such as Facebook, for example, your business needs to interact with your audience. But, how?

Your content needs to encourage people to “like”, comment and share your posts, for example.

In theory, that sounds simple, doesn’t it? But creating quality content that leads to interaction is a huge challenge. It demands a lot of research and creativity.

To make it easier, plan your editorial calendar and create content for the first month. My suggestion is that you open a spreadsheet and write the following columns: date, format, content, and purpose.

At first, my tip is to start with three posts per week. Over time and with your organic range on Facebook beginning to increase, you can plan one or more posts per day.

Don’t forget to test the image formats, video or text only-to options to understand what works best with your audience.

Want a tip?

Plan a live stream as soon as your fan page debuts. Facebook notifies your followers when the live stream begins. If well-organized, it could become the first post with relevant, organic reach and it could engage your audience.

Oh! And during the planning stage, keep in mind that there isn’t a preconceived solution to encourage people to access your fan page. What do exist are good practices, you need to know them and try to figure out if they make sense for your business.

Test formats and measure the results

After the first month, you will have a good number of publications. By then, your page should already have a certain number of followers, “likes” and organic comments. Then, it will be time to measure the results.

Data collection is critical to evaluate what’s working and improve it further. And, of course, to rethink what’s going wrong.

There are several possibilities in data analysis. In our case, the focus is on increasing the organic reach on Facebook, right?

So, let’s go for a practical example: analyzing what format of content generated more engagement.

Choose three posts with videos and three with photos. Define which KPIs to analyze (we have a post that will help you define them). From the results, you can decide which format should be used more frequently.

This is a simple scenario which makes it possible to analyze your metrics.

In fact, data analysis should aid you make decisions and to assess whether your work on Facebook is reaching the goals you have set.

Invest time on Facebook

As I said at the beginning of this post, Facebook’s algorithm has changed and, trust me, lots of people have seen the organic range of the publications on their Facebook pages decrease.

There is no magic formula for every single person to see everything you post. But you’ve seen you can put some strategies into motion for your publications to reach a larger audience.

The main point here is to create content that will engage your audience. This way, they will interact more with your fan page, what will make the reach of the publications to go up.

Regardless, you should know that Facebook is a great channel to get to know your audience, engross your potential customers, and even to make online sales.

So, remember to invest time in your Facebook page so that you can promote your business in multiple channels.

Do you have any questions or want to learn more about this matter? Be sure to check also our text that teaches how to sell on Facebook.