In case you already don’t know, only a small percentage of your Facebook page fans see your posts. This used to be around 16%, but some page owners experienced a decrease in their Facebook page reach after promoted posts were introduced as reported by this New York Times article. The biggest decrease in reach occurred in December 2013, when Facebook made some changes to their algorithm.
A week after the Facebook changes, Ignite, a social media marketing agency, analyzed 689 posts from 21 Facebook pages and found that Facebook’s organic reach and organic reach percentage had each declined by 44% on average. For some pages the decline was as high as 88%.
So how do you cope with the changes and increase your Facebook page reach?
You might wonder if it is possible, but you can’t really quit Facebook, with over 1.28 billion active users, Facebook is still the top network for social media marketing. The only solution is to step up your efforts to reach your audience and this article will show you exactly how to do that…
1. Post at the best time:
If you want to increase your Facebook page reach you need to post when your fans are online. Usually the best time to post on Facebook is between 1 and 4 PM. But you can find your page’s best time to post by visiting the page’s insights.
Under the posts tab you will be able to view the days and times at which most of your fans are online.
Schedule your Facebook posts to go out on these days and times.
2. Boost posts:
Boosting a post is probably the best way to increase your Facebook page reach. You can boost a post for as little as $5 and get more people to see it. You can even target the audience you would like to reach. If you are skeptical about this feature you should read this post by Scott Ayres of Post Planner.
Here he describes how boosting a post with $20 helped him increase his Facebook reach, generate $2400 in revenue and 22 page ‘Likes’.
3. Share more images and videos:
A study by Hubspot found that images get 53% more likes and 104% more comments than the average post.
So make an effort to share more images like article covers, comics, graphs, photos, etc. along with the text and links you share as they can be influential in increasing Facebook page reach.
If your fans enjoy watching videos you could post them more often as Facebook announced a change to their video ranking algorithm yesterday. Videos posted will appear in fans news feeds depending on if they watch videos and for how long. Other factors like the number of comments, ‘Likes’ and shares the videos receive will still be considered by the algorithm.
Try out these three tips and watch your Facebook page reach skyrocket.
