Much has been made of the issue of organic reach in recent times. Facebook has crippled it because they hate free advertising. They want to push people towards paying for exposure, and it makes sense considering advertising is its main income stream.
Before you decide to spend a lot of money on interacting with your target audience, stop right there. You still have options for enhancing your organic exposure on Facebook, and this article is going to show you how.
1. Start with Killer Content
Quality content is king simply because when people engage with your page they are going to constantly receive more updates from it in their news feed. Facebook’s filtered news feed prioritizes things that you have engaged with before.
Focus on quality content that’s going to get people to like, share, or comment on it. Figure out what other brands are posting about and use that to inspire you.
2. Use Facebook Insights
The more you know about your audience the more chance you have of engaging with them organically. Use Facebook Insights as your primary analytics platform. You can find out absolutely everything about those who have interacted with your fan page.
You can measure the performance of individual pieces of content, along with the demographics of the people visiting your page even for a moment.
This will help you to make better decisions.
3. Use Facebook Insights on Your Competitors
Facebook doesn’t actually have a tool that you can use to find out about your competitors. The closet thing they have is a way to compare your competitor’s pages to yours, so you can stay on top of their engagement rate, like total, and the number of posts that they post each week. But there are a variety of third-party tools that do exist for this purpose. Some examples include BuzzSumo, Simply Measured, and Social Bakers. These are here to help brands find out about what content their competitors are posting that’s yielding great results.
Gain inspiration from your competitors and try variations of what they are doing to try to get an edge on them. It’s worth experimenting to see what results you can come up with.
4. Focus on Building a Community
Your Facebook presence should be about the people you are speaking to, not you. Social media should be about building up a real online community where you interact with your target audience and your target audience interacts with each other.
What the top brands all have in common is that they have thriving communities that function largely independently from the brand that created them in the first place.
The key to building a community? Avoid pushing your products too often and post useful content.
5. Don’t Allow Laziness to Overcome You
Laziness is not just a problem for procrastinators. There are brands that may want faster growth yet will try to artificially inflate their numbers through engaging in grey and black hat social media practices. For example, buying followers is a common practice that will get your account banned.
Do things the right way and don’t be tempted by promises of fast results. You can’t force a relationship to grow with another human being. It’s going to happen at a certain pace, and you are never going to be able to accelerate that pace without compromising the relationship.
Conclusion – Doing Things the Right Way
Doing things the right way, is about letting things play out naturally. It takes time to build a Facebook community that thrives. Unless you are lucky enough to go viral, there are no quick shortcuts to get to your eventual destination.
But if you do things the right way you are guaranteed success in the long-term.
Featured image courtesy of Flickr.
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