If your business is active on Facebook, which it should be (for your sake), you may be finding it difficult of late to reach your usual amount of fans with posts. We can assure you that you are not alone, as Facebook’s algorithm, EdgeRank, has really clamped down on the reach of organic (free) posts.
EdgeRank was designed by Facebook to enhance the user experience of a Facebook audience that had become over-saturated with content they simply had no interest in. Whether it was seeing a post a friend “liked” by someone you never even met, or a discount image from the local restaurant that was outdated by a few days, there simply was too much content vying for user’s attention.
What EdgeRank does, in a nutshell, is limit the content that can appear on someone’s news-feed by prioritizing the pages/profiles you most interact with, content with images or videos, and posts that are most recent.
Though overall organic reach is down, it is still possible to have your content seen by your fans. It just requires a little more thought and creativity.
If you want to reach the largest audience possible, without spending a dime on Facebook advertising, the following tips might be helpful.
Post at your business’ prime hours: In Facebook Insights, you will see a tab called “posts.” In that section, there is information about how many of your fans are on Facebook each day of the week and the times throughout the day that they are on Facebook. Though the graphs are limited to a one-week period, they still give great insight into when your audience is available.
So, if your business’ audience is mostly online between 7PM – 9PM on Wednesdays and Sundays, it would make since to schedule your posts to be delivered at the time range.
Post image and video-based content: Facebook has put a great deal of emphasis on visual content (specifically, video content), and it has been apparent in recent months in regards to organic post reach. The truth is, your business should rarely post text-only content. Most people aren’t looking to read mini-essays or random facts, as they’re eyes will skip right past them. What they do stop for, however, is visual content.
Posting irrelevant videos or pictures isn’t enough, unfortunately, and you should put a great deal of thought into what visuals you post on Facebook. One great strategy is to post behind-the-scenes photos of you workplace.
A picture of your secretary blowing out the candles on a birthday cake at her desk is sure to resonate with your audience, and receive a great deal of engagement. On the other hand, a blurry and pixelated picture of an outdated promotional image is less likely to garner results.
Cater your content to YOUR audience: Far too many businesses fail to target the appropriate audience, and it’s understandable. A dentist is not likely to be well versed in the concepts of marketing and may be prone to operating on his/her own misconceptions about their audience.
They may think, for example, that their target audience for their optometry business are senior citizens. Though that may be true, overall, it likely won’t apply to their Facebook audience.
If their Facebook has access to Insights (which requires 30 fans), they should reference the “people” tab. This tab includes useful information about their audience’s age and gender. Within the “people” section, there is the “your fans” tab and the “people engaged” tab. “Your fans” is an overall evaluation of the age and gender of your business’ fans, and “people engaged” is an evaluation of the members of your audience who engage most with your posts.
Using this information, the optometrist can now decipher which audience to post for.
Instead of the senior citizens route, he now realizes that his Facebook audience is mostly females between the ages of 25-34. So, a post featuring a new set of designer female glasses probably makes more sense than a post about eye-drops for seniors.
There are so many things that businesses need to consider these days when posting content on Facebook. EdgeRank has made the lives of everyday business owners on Facebook much more time-consuming and tedious, but thankfully, there are businesses like NEXT! Ad Agency that have social media experts available to take on the burden of maximizing your page’s reach! They can help you get the most out of organic approaches, or they can help you see the great rewards of effective advertising methods on Facebook.
We hope you find these strategies useful on your business’ Facebook page. We encourage you to be creative when trying to work around EdgeRank’s limitations and feel out your page’s audience. What works for some businesses, might not work for others, so experimentation may be your best bet.
If you have any questions, comments, or strategies of your own, we encourage you to share them in the “comment” section below!
