[:en]As marketing professionals, we strive for the greatest returns on our customer outreach. Since Facebook tweaked (and continues to) its algorithms, many marketers have voiced their discontent with the decline of organic reach of Facebook posts and pages. As a result, businesses must now supplement their organic post reach efforts with some paid advertising, through boosted posts and sponsored stories. Nevertheless, increasing the success of your organic reach is still attainable without trying to chase the algorithm.
Use Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights are an indispensable tool, allowing you to track and measure the performance of a post. By analyzing the Insights data, marketers can discover the engagement rate of each post, tracking trends and valuable info on fans to develop a customized plan for the greatest reach.
Diversify Your Content
If you want your fans to return to your page on a regular basis, you must provide relevant and valuable content. Remember, they subscribed to your page because they are interested in you! Provide intriguing content, and enhance it with images, videos, links to helpful resources, etc. This will help your posts to stand out amongst competing news stories, to get the attention it deserves.
Develop a Content Strategy
Before posting a story or writing a post, ask yourself this question; what am I trying to achieve? Do you want to begin a discussion in the comments? Do you want people to take action? Do you want them to click through to your website? By determining the end-goal, you can narrow your focus, and often, that is the key to success.
Know When Your Audience is Online and Post Accordingly
Your target audience might not be online 24/7. If your fans are asleep when you post content, you will undoubtedly have low organic reach. Using Facebook Insights will determine when most of your fans are online, and give you the opportunity to post at optimal times for the greatest engagement results.
Post with Clear Calls to Action
Don’t be shy – if you want your fans to respond, tell them so. Users are much more likely to click on a link, join a forum, like a page, etc., if you clearly describe the action you want them to take.
Ask Questions
All journalists or conversationalists’ worth their snuff understand the power of asking the right question. People fundamentally want to share their opinions, so give them the opportunity. Use plenty of questions in your posts, proving a platform for comments.
Learn more about your audience
Page insights are great for learning about how your fans respond to you content, but we should always strive to learn more about our audience. If you aren’t currently using Facebook’s Audience Insights – start! This tool puts a wealth of data at your fingertips about your current page fans (and more!) like demographic info, career, their purchase activity, which other pages are popular among them, purchase behavior among a host of others. You can use this data to further determine what kind of content your audience will find interesting within your niche and focus to their lifestyle.
About the Author: Erik Leist
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