Maximize Your Facebook For Business Page Impressions

Organic Reach on Facebook is NOT dead

Every social media marketer and business owner who has been using Facebook for more than a year or two understands the frustration that I am referring to when I say that it is extremely disheartening to take a look at the number of impressions that a post that you thought was really great (and 2 years ago would have gotten fabulous organic reach) and see this:

At one point, in an attempt to relieve some of my frustration, I tried to research what types of things I should be posting to maximize my organic reach.  I found TONS of blog posts and articles telling me what the ideal time to post is and a few telling me some content ideas. I think that these bloggers and writers are missing the boat.

While it is certainly worth taking the few seconds to go to Facebook insights and find out the times that your users are online and attempt to schedule your updates for optimum times, in reality my experience has been that the content and form of your post are way more important in determining how many impressions your post will get.  In other words, if you are not following the tips below and you post one post at an optimum time and another similar post at a less optimum time, you will get a comparable number of impressions. Try it and see.

As far as content goes, no one is a bigger believer in content than me (see #1 below) but no blogger is going to be able to tell me what kind of content to post.  I need to know my product and my target audience and develop my content around them in order to engage them.

In Facebook’s bid to generate more income and to get us to increase our advertising budgets, there is no doubt that organic reach is down and nothing that you do (other than shelling out money) will get you the types of results that you got two years ago but as marketers we need to make an effort to do everything we can to get our clients and business the most free exposure that we can.

So what can be done to increase your organic reach?

Here are my tips.

1. Content, content content.  Just like marketers need to provide Google with quality content. So too we need to provide Facebook with quality content.  You can not simply say “buy this” and link to your homepage.  Find fabulous infographics, articles and pictures that your target audience will be interested in.  Facebook will automatically limit the number of impressions that a post will receive if it contains a link to your website.  This does not mean you shouldn’t be linking to your website but it does mean you should be creating content that goes beyond it.
2. Vary the form of the updates that you post.  If you consistently send out updates that contain a photo, your impressions will stagnate. Try varying updates with photos, links, questions, and even updates that have no link at all.
3. Speaking of Links.  Share other Pages or Friends Links on your business page.  Find an status update that relates to your page, has great content and has gotten great engagement on Facebook and share it on your page!
4. Post Multiple photos!!! This works really well. Try posting 4 photos in one update.  You will get a lovely collage (take a screenshot and send it to your clients), it will very likely invite engagement and even without engagement will increase your organic reach.  (Or here is another idea that I have used. Post two photos, one a product from your site and the other a photo from another site such as Pinterest that shows your product being used – link to both sites). DON”T post multiple photos all the time.  The downside to this is that you cannot use a scheduling tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite. You must do this on Facebook itself.
5. Use hashtags. I wasn’t a believer in this until I tried it myself. I started adding in hashtags to my posts, impressions went up and now I’m a believer.  (But please use caution and don’t overdo it).
6. Status Tags.  If you are referencing a person, place, organization, etc. just type an @ symbol, start typing and see if your reference appears in a dropdown list.  Simple and it works.

So do what you can to maximize your organic reach. Let me know how it goes.