If you’ve been managing a Facebook page over the past few years, you have most likely noticed a steady decline in how many of your fans are viewing and interacting with your organic posts. This is in response to a number of reasons. One of the reasons for this is because Facebook’s primary focus is to have a platform which is user friendly. There’s simply too much content being published on Facebook. This is making visibility in the News Feed increasingly competitive. Facebook is now intentionally showing people the organic posts which is of the most relevance to its users, instead of showing all surfacing content as they are being published.
When “Fan Pages” launched in 2007, anyone and everyone would create a page for their company or organization. These pages would collect fans, publish unlimited content and messages with the assumption that everyone of their followers would see their posts. Years later, it was learned that an overage of only 16% of their following would see what they have published. By 2014, that number dropped to 6.5% and is expected to make another drastic drop early 2018 to about 1.6%-2%. In addition to the decrease in reach, Facebook is also conducting testing for having designated sections, one for personal use (friends, family, pages users care about) and another for business pages (similar to an explore page).
With all these changes happening, finding creative ways to improve your organic reach while staying in alignment with Facebooks requirements is going to important. You may be wonder what you can do to increase your visibility on Facebook organically. Well there are 4 simple practices you can implement immediately…
Video Content
Video content is very important when creating posts, both organically and paid. Your goal when creating videos is to have it be 60 to 90 seconds long and to get a completion view rate of 75%.
Authentic Posts
Staying authentic with your posts will help separate you from your competition. Facebook will see that your content is different which means will attract viewer. In turn, they will place your post to get more views as it will be ranked higher.
Stay Timely
Being timely with your posts will be important for your ranking. The timeliness Facebook is looking for is in regard to immediate interest of its viewers, current events and trending topics. This doesn’t mean that you should post content outside the subject of your business or service. Incorporate motivational or inspirational topics within your business topics to help the ranking of your post.
Targeting
A new option Facebook is slowly rolling out to its users is the option to target for individuals directly from your post. This will allow you to target specific individuals to see your post. This option will be located on the bottom tool bar of the screen you create your post, the same area where you have the option to add photos or publish your post.
What you want to stay away from is being overly promotional (i.e. posts created for the sole purpose to push people to buy, promotion entry, giveaway or contest, reused content from a paid ad, no leads to website, blogs or other pages), negative feedback, to many people un-liking your page or hiding of your post
Incorporating these action steps into your posts will help you rank higher, which will then give you a better ranking on the explore page once it has been rolled out by Facebook in the U.S.
