As I’m writing this I’m thinking about Monte Pythons, “Bring out your dead!” scene. I can’t help it, I’m wired that way. But the truth is that without paying for advertising on Facebook, the chances of your content getting seen is as likely as meeting your favorite celebrity.
So Facebook organic reach is dead. No matter what marketers are selling you or business consultants, without paid advertising, you’re not going to be heard.
Organic reach has been on the decline because anyone with a smart phone can create, edit and post content. There is just frankly content overload on the web going on. This has caused sites and search engines to be smarter about who and what gets preference. Each time you logon to Facebook there is a chance to have over 1500 stories appear in your news feed, depending upon how many friends you have.
From Brian Boland, VP of Advertising at Facebook:
On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and Page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on.
Facebook’s Algorithm
Facebook’s algorithm is not like Google’s, you can’t really optimize content like a webpage. But you can control what kind of content you publish that users will stop and like and watch. Back in March Facebook prioritized Videos in it’s feed. This means that posts with a video are more likely to be viewed than ones that are images. Live videos are viewed 3x longer than a previously recorded and uploaded video. Something to think about in your next PR strategy.
In April an update was released to pay more attention to what you do on Facebook. From the links you click to the videos your watching. It’s scary, but it’s the best way to serve the most relevant content to your users so that they keep coming back. Facebook measures what you are interested in regardless if you like, share or comment.
Facebook was made for people not businesses, so the result is Facebook focusing on it’s users not businesses, meaning businesses have to pay to play. However, that is still not a guarantee their content is seen.
Better Ads
Facebook knows there are terrible experiences on it’s site with ads. That’s why tailoring how you see ads and interact with them on their platform has become a priority as well. By setting your ad preferences you can choose the industry and type of ads you prefer to see based on your interests. This is something that forces advertisers to rethink and reformat how they advertise.
Trending Topics
Trending topics are “viral” content that the majority of folks are chatting about and sharing. Directly mentioning with a “@“ will work, but the social network is smart enough that simply having the name of the topic in your shared post or comment is enough.
Trending topics are hot button issues that you can jump in on to gain exposure but be careful it’s not something you are merely doing to gain attention for a inappropriate topic. If the trending topic is about a tragedy it’s not wise PR to mention yourself or your promote your brand, it’s just insensitive and results in negative PR.
Better Content
As I wrote above, video is getting priority in the feed. So if you have a smart phone and a well planned strategy and script for what you want to present it’s half the work. Most brands are not using video due to monetary assets not available. Others are just getting started or looking to how they can leverage Facebook Live, even though Facebook is late to the party on live broadcasting technically.
Get your page verified
Seems like a redundant thing to include in a blog post, but surprisingly there are a huge number of business pages not verified, and even more that are utilizing vanity URL’s still. Getting you page verified with Facebook will help in small and big ways as it says that there is a group of people or at least a person, behind the brands page.
Don’t believe what others say about Google, Facebook or other social networks without going to the source which is Google, Facebook and Twitter’s blogs. They have them to empower readers and business owners alike to get the truth from the horses mouth and not from a horses… well, I’m sure you know.
