How to Get More Facebook Fans Organically: A Guide for Small Business Owners

According to a study conducted by G2 Crowd, 80% small businesses now consider Facebook their primary marketing channel. This could be because they find Facebook marketing affordable, or effective, or a combination of both. This could also be because creating a Facebook Business page is among the easiest things small business owners could do to kickstart their marketing efforts.

While it’s easy to create a Business page, it’s anything but easy to run marketing successfully on the platform. Here are some of the reasons why your Facebook marketing is failing –

-You publish content sporadically (if you don’t have the time to post consistently, consider using a social media management tool that supports automation)
-You don’t have a Facebook marketing strategy
-You rely on ads to grow and engage your audience
-Your marketing strategy doesn’t address Facebook’s declining organic reach

Why your organic reach on Facebook has declined

Ever since Facebook switched from EdgeRank to a sophisticated machine learning algorithm in 2013, organic reach for businesses has been on the decline. The new algorithm considers over 100,000 factors to rank posts in users’ feeds. Among them are –

-Affinity – The interactions between your fans and your brand
-Weight – The quality and type of your content (On Facebook, certain types of content, like visual content, carry more weight than others)
-Decay – The age of the post (Older posts show up less often on feeds than younger posts)

It's no surprise that Facebook has limited organic reach for businesses, after all, Facebook is a for-profit organization and is home to millions of business pages that are all vying for user attention. So it gets businesses to pay for exposure.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you rely completely on paid exposure. Organic reach on Facebook is still relevant and important.

Why organic reach on Facebook matters

People react differently to advertisements and organic content. A growing segment of people despise ads, and about 30% of them have begun to use Ad Block software to keep ads astray.

Plus, Facebook ads are not intent based like Google ads. Facebook ads are simply displayed to the entirety of your target audience, a group that includes people who are not remotely ready to purchase from or even engage with your brand. Organic Facebook marketing plays an important role in targeting such people.

How to organically grow your fan following on Facebook

Publishing without a strategy won’t get you very far with Facebook marketing. You need a sound strategy and content created considering Facebook’s feed ranking system. Here are 7 quick tips to increase your organic reach on Facebook today.

1. Post more often

Social media managers underestimate the volume of posts published on Facebook. Like Twitter, Facebook has tons of posts being published every second, and it doesn’t hurt you to publish posts repeatedly.

Create multiple versions of the same post and save them in DrumUp libraries. Connect your Facebook page to DrumUp and set the posts in the libraries on an auto-posting schedule.

2. Identify windows of high engagement & capitalize on them

Your audience is more active during specific time intervals. But those time intervals won’t necessarily give you the most engagement. For some brands, publishing during off-hours gives better results. Jon Loomer found that his engagement was better for posts published during off-hours (10pm to 3 am) than for posts published during peak hours (6am to 3pm).

Use Facebook’s analytics (or DrumUp’s social media analytics) to identify your windows of high-engagement and log them into DrumUp for easy 1-click schedule of posts during them.

3. Use CTAs

Most social media managers misunderstand virality. “Viral” doesn’t mean a massive amount of engagement; it simply refers to how a content is distributed (through engagement). When your fans engage with your content, it appears on their friends’ feeds. And CTAs work wonders in getting fans to engage.

Facebook marketing expert Nidhi Singh A/B tested a post, with and without a CTA, and observed that the CTA version got 20% more reach than the expected standard.

4. Experiment with content types

As mentioned earlier on this post, certain content types (especially visuals) get more reach on Facebook than other content types. And there are so many types of visual content with which you can experiment.

Conduct A/B tests every time you publish a post and collect data pertaining to what works best with your audience. You can even curate content in libraries and set them on a repeat schedule.

5. Go LIVE

Everyone who has liked your page will get a notification when you’re LIVE, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s official statement.  So for important messages and brand announcements, consider using Facebook LIVE in addition to your regular marketing activities.

You can use Facebook LIVE for anything from product launches to QnAs and random entertainment. Trey Ratcliff, professional photographer, gets fans to submit photos and reviews them LIVE.

6. Cross-post on other social networks

If you have already built a sizeable audience on other social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn, or marketing channels like email, you can use that audience to build your Facebook following.

Add your Facebook page link to your other social profiles, add clickable social icons to your email or broadcast your Facebook page info to your other social networks and ask them to follow you.

7. Use transparency

Today’s audience is smart. They don’t appreciate ads being forced on them. They celebrate independence and honesty, which is why transparency is such a great marketing strategy when targeting them.

Show your audience what happens behind the scenes. Be transparent about your intentions. Respect their space and refrain from forcing ads on them. McDonald’s has a website dedicated to answering customers’ questions about the food in their kitchens.

Wrap
Organic Facebook marketing matters, when building a real and engaged community that will earn you business in the long run. Use the ideas mentioned on this post to boost your organic Facebook reach today.

Feature image via Freepik.com 

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