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Facebook is a powerful tool for your business. With over 2.38 billion monthly active users during the first quarter of 2019, this social media giant is an excellent platform for reaching a large audience. However, with over 60 million businesses promoting their products and services on Facebook, competition can be tight. If you want to make use of it to improve your sales conversions, then you’ll have to take a few essential steps. Improving your organic reach is one of them. In this blog, we're going to offer a Facebook cheat sheet that'll help improve your pages performance — especially organic reach.Before we proceed to the other important details, let's delve into one thing that should be clarified first and foremost – what organic reach actually means and why it’s important to improve it.
What is Organic Reach?
If you aren’t familiar with the term, organic reach refers to the number of people who are able to come upon your content naturally and without the aid of paid ads. This means it can help you save advertising costs since it’s cheaper than ads. It’s also easier to drive sales conversions because the people who are engaging with your content are those who are already interested in what you offer.
You might have heard of Facebook’s constantly changing algorithm. Because of these changes, the content strategies that worked well before no longer produce the same satisfactory results at present. As an effect, there is a visible decline in organic reach.
If you’ve noticed this happening on the pages that you managed, then know that you’re not alone.
Here are some things you can do to improve your Facebook page’s organic reach, along with a Facebook cheat sheet that condenses some of the most important parts.
Post Daily and Consistently
How many times should you post in a day? Many brands do well with one or two. Some benefit from posting three times a week. This is something you need to test and measure, using a social media management tool like eClincher.However, the most important thing is that you’re posting consistently and during the time when your followers or audience are active. When you go too long without posting, you get buried in people's feeds and they no longer see you. Thus, your organic reach suffers.Plus, only a small percentage of your followers are seeing your content to begin with. Therefore, posting diligently is of utmost importance.
We’ll be discussing more on how to determine the best time for posting later on in this blog.
Share Other People’s Posts
Facebook loves user-generated content. More importantly, your audience appreciates user-generated content. Furthermore, this type of content can help your business in many ways:
Gain Audience Insights
User-generated content can give you relevant information on how your audience and customers see your brand. Think of it as a free survey. Whether it’s positive or negative feedback, you’ll be able to use it to enhance your product, service, and strategies.
Improve Relationship With Customers
How do you feel when other people share your content on social media? Do you feel happy? Proud? People love getting recognized, and sharing user-generated content (a.k.a. sharing your customers’ posts on your feed) can help your brand build a connection with your clients.
Curate Fresh and Unique Content
Your audience has their own style and ingenuity when it comes to crafting their own content. Sharing their content can add variety to your Facebook feed. Furthermore, it can help build up your brand’s credibility. As an added bonus, this type of content is free.
Improve Engagement
Sharing user-generated content can help boost audience engagement. As a matter of fact, user-generated content that features a brand can drive more engagement than company-generated posts. People are going to trust and believe your customers more than your brand. This is why reviews and testimonials are so powerful.Before you start reposting other people’s content on your feed, please take note of a few reminders.First, you should always give credit to the original creator. Nobody likes seeing their work getting stolen. If you’re sharing or curating content from other people, make sure you properly give recognition to the person who made it.Second, if you’re not sure if it’s okay to use the material, ask. You can do this simply by sending a message to the creator.
Third, don’t modify the content, especially if you haven’t received permission from the owner.
Use a Call-to-Action
Yes, you can have a call-to-action (CTA) button on your Facebook ads. However, you should also take advantage of the power of CTAs in your organic posts.Add text like, "Shop now and get 10% off your first purchase," or "Sign up today to get your freebie" in either the post text or as text overlay on the image. When adding CTAs on your post, try to provide specific instructions as much as possible. Don't make people work too hard, because they won't.You can utilize CTAs to guide your audience and to encourage them to engage with your content.
Check Your Analytics Daily
Analytics are essential. They’re your guide. They inform you whether your strategy is doing well or not.Analytics help you determine when your audience is active so you’ll know what time to post your content. They give you information on what type of content people are engaging with and what types of content you should focus your attention on. They let you know which among your strategies work and which don’t.If you want to improve your organic reach, engagement, and conversions, then you have to constantly check your analytics. They can provide you with significant quantitative data that you can use to make better decisions.
Always Engage With Comments — Even the Negative Ones
Comments help keep your organic reach alive. Whenever someone leaves a comment on your post, don’t be afraid to engage with them. Doing this can help improve (or build) your relationship with your followers and your audience, encourage them to engage with your content, and makes your brand seem more human.This isn't just good for your followers — Facebook notices it too. With the way their algorithm works, responding to comments works in your favor. In fact, at present, comments are more powerful than likes and shares. You might even consider creating posts with the goal of getting as many comments as possible.Even if someone comments merely to tag a friend or leave a smiley face, like the comment and thank them for it.And yes, you should even respond to negative comments. These are as important as — and possibly more important than — the positive ones. It's an opportunity to change someone's mind about your brand and resolve an issue. It's also a positive reflection on your brand when you acknowledge someone who isn't happy in a professional way, trying to solve the problem.
Encourage Reviews and Always Respond to Them
Reviews – whether good or bad – can be used to your advantage. Good reviews can help improve your audience’s trust and promote your brand. In fact, many shoppers admit that customer reviews influence their purchasing decisions.Bad reviews, on the other hand, can help you understand your audience’s pains and what you should improve on.Whenever you receive a review, remember to respond to them – especially if it’s a negative review. This is to assure your audience (or customers) that you’re taking their feedback seriously and that you’re making an effort to make your product or service better for them.Side note: Keep in mind that eventually,every brand receives negative reviews. It's okay.Encourage reviews by posting on all your social media channels once a week reminding people how and where they can leave one. (Be sure to provide the link.) You can also send email blasts to your subscribers asking them for reviews.
Experiment With Different Kinds of Content
Variety adds spice to your feed. If you want to keep things interesting for your followers, then always find ways to create content that your audience wants to see.
One way to do this is to experiment with different types of content. You can try out images, videos, GIFs, and even text-only content. You can use analytics to identify the best content for organic reach and engagement and create more of that content while mixing in a few others every now and then.Here are a few tips to help you.
Share Blog Posts
If you’re keeping a blog (and you absolutely should), share your posts on social media. This can help drive more traffic to your website and at the same time provide your audience with something informative that they can sink their teeth into.
Share News
People love being in the know and up to date on the latest and greatest. If there are company-related events (such as a press release or product launches) or news about the industry that you think your audience should be aware of, then post a link to the article on your Facebook feed.
Share Content That Can Help Your Audience
If you have tips, information about how to do things, and other things related to your product or service that can help your audience, then share it on Facebook.
Host Contests and Giveaways
Facebook contests can keep your audience excited, help you gain more followers, and boost engagement. Just make sure to check the rules before you implement a contest for your page, so that you don't get on Facebook's bad side. An important note about content and giveaways: Make sure the prize has something to do with your brand. A lot of businesses will give away very nice but very generic gifts like iPads. If an iPad has nothing to do with your business, then it won't do much when it comes to turning your content entrants into loyal followers.
The goal with contents and giveaways isn't just to drum up excitement and chatter. It's to get people to notice your brand and stick with you in the long run.When used strategically, Facebook can be a powerful tool to boost your organic traffic and your conversion rate. Facebook is constantly updating their algorithm to improve its users’ experience, and this can make it difficult for marketers to succeed, especially when it comes to optimizing content to improve exposure.Just keep in mind that what’s most important is creating good and relevant content for your target audience that can entertain, inform, or help people. Review to our Facebook cheat sheet for help, and you'll begin to see some progress.Questions for us? Leave a comment below!
