You can tailor your desired reach based on user location, age, gender and interests to optimise your organic performance on Facebook.
Just how difficult is it to achieve decent organic reach and engagement on Facebook? On average, organic engagement levels hover around 1% or less. Sure, every now and then you hit it big with an organic post that experiences booming reach and engagement, but this scenario is becoming more and more rare these days.
What is organic reach? It’s the connection you make with Facebook users without paying for advertising. It’s those posts you put up free of charge on your business Facebook wall.
Facebook makes its money from advertising but makes no money from you using organic methods of engagement. Thus, they’re restricting the reach and performance of this medium so business owners, marketers and those with budget control would pay for ads in order to boost reach, engagement and hopefully, sales.
Let’s run through five tips to boost your organic reach and engagement, and get into the news feeds of your target audience.
1. Audience targeting
Not everybody who has liked your page fits your target market. It’s no secret that random Facebook users may like your page. But they may never actually engage with your content, visit your website, or become a customer.
Audience targeting is a new Facebook feature that works just like paid ad targeting on social media, except this allows you to control it for organic posts.
By using this feature, you can target posts so only people who are most likely to be interested in the content will see it.
This feature is extremely powerful for one very simple reason. As you begin increasing the volume of your organic posts, not everyone who follows your page will want or need to see every single post. And if they are forced to, they may become fatigued with the constant messaging that isn’t necessarily tailored to their interests, and might just unlike you.
The preferred audience feature solves this problem. Especially for companies that have more than one product or service for sale. You can tailor your desired reach based on user location, age, gender and interests. So while you might broadcast generic information, you can target special deals to a local audience that can visit your store.
2. Boosting a post
You can use Facebook’s Post Engagement Ads to give your posts a bit of a boost, which is exactly what Facebook calls it – to boost a post. So you spend a little bit to create reach for the post in the news feed of targeted users.
For example, you create and push a new post live. Depending on your fans numbers, you might have it seen by a couple of hundred people.
But by investing just $30 to promote it, you can expect numbers in the ballpark of 5000 impressions, and a healthy dose of clicks, follows and likes along with a big boost in organic engagements as a result.
For the next part, we will look into how you can analyse the performance of your posts, how to use video ontent and have more engaged followers.
Nathan Sinnott, Chief Executive Officer, Newpath WEB
