Has your organic reach on Facebook been dwindling? Since launching its marketing platform, Facebook has been making changes to its algorithm. In the beginning of September 2017, significant changes were made that affected many pages. Marketing professionals noted the decrease in Facebook’s organic reach – and they were right. But, what does that mean for businesses whose primary ad placement is on Facebook?
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The number of Facebook’s users is steadily growing every month, and the trend continues to go upwards. While marketers might rejoice at these numbers, that also means that people are consuming more content. The latest research shows that people are turning to social media channels for their daily dose of news (where Facebook is still their preferred platform). However, this also means that newsfeeds easily get cluttered.
Until the latest algorithm change, Facebook’s organic post reach was around 2%, which means that if your business page has 10 000 likes, when you post an update, only about 200 people will actually see it in their newsfeed. Whether these people choose to interact with your post or just scroll down and don’t even see it, is another topic altogether. But now, organic reach numbers look even worse. There are several reasons why Facebook implemented this algorithm. Even though they say that they just want to serve more relevant content to its users (which is true nonetheless), they are also in it for the money, which is a given. If you want to promote something, Facebook should still be your go-to platform due to the fact of its cost-effectiveness and its numerous targeting options.
It should be noted that the number of businesses that have created Facebook pages is also on the rise, and that marketers are turning to paid Facebook marketing more and more – it’s hard to reach customers when ad space is limited, and there are so many competitors who are fighting for it. The equation is simple – more businesses on Facebook, more boosted posts, and limited ad space. Facebook indeed needs to make those ads more relevant to the content consumer. It doesn’t hurt that that also means more revenue for the company.
So, what can you do to increase your organic reach? Our top tip is to further refine your target audience and focus on ad optimization. Now more than ever it’s important that you reach your golden customer, and the first step to finding them on Facebook is better customer segmentation. Did you know that through advanced Facebook targeting options, you can go as far as creating campaigns that can reach 1 specific person? Read more about these advanced targeting options here.
Our second tip is to make sure content follows Facebook’s preferred trends – and that’s a bit tricky. Currently, Facebook is trying to steal Twitter’s thunder for being the most in-the-now-platform. When you want to know what’s happening, you go to Twitter and browse trending topics. Like we mentioned earlier, Facebook aims to become the go-to news platform, and that means that they are changing their algorithm to better serve newsworthy content to its users. Chances are your business isn’t in the news reporting business (if it is, then you’re in luck!), and that your organic reach will dwindle because your content isn’t about current news.
You’ve heard this before, but now more than ever you should invest time and money into creating high quality content, because with the latest updates Facebook also plans to fight the empty clickbait links. One of the factors that Facebook takes into consideration is users’ visit duration when they click on a link, so when people do visit clickbait links and spend a fraction of time, leaving unsatisfied, Facebook will factor that in. Newsworthy, high quality content that visitors engage with, will be rewarded with better reach.
Using curated content? It’s still a valuable tactic, but reconsider your original sources. Facebook ranks some news publishers higher than the others, so the same post, with the same curated content, but posted from another source can yield very different results. This is a trial-and-error tip, so you have to play with different sources to find the best one. Sorry, no cheat-sheet there!
In the attempt of decluttering users’ timelines, Facebook is also tampered with posting frequency and its reach. Unless it’s a news publishing page, the more content the business post throughout the day, the more will organic reach and engagement drop per post.
Lastly, if you are finding all this algorithm talk boring, you can always hire Twenty3Media to take care of your social media marketing J Feel free to browse through our portfolio here and get in touch if you need help!