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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Three Ways To Grow Your Community Online

 Online marketing is a constantly evolving challenge. One day we are told email marketing is the key to success and the next that email is dead. The way we think about reaching, capturing and engaging with our audience and our customers’ needs to reflect how they themselves engage online.

For me, that’s all about community. Ironically as we become more and more enmeshed in our digital worlds, the desire for connection becomes even greater. So how do we bring those two worlds together?

Here are 3 easy to implement ways to grow your online community.

Launch a Facebook Group

Facebook Groups are a fantastic way to build community around your core area of expertise and knowledge and like most things online, it’s about the quality of engagement, not the number of members. Of course, you want to grow your group, but do not be put off from setting one up by thinking that you need thousands of members for it to be successful, you don’t.

What you do need is to provide value and a real sense of community. That will require you to dedicate time into the group each day, to initiate conversations, to engage in others conversations and of course to steer the group itself.

So how do you start one? Pick a topic that you are passionate about and that is related to your core business. Start a group and make sure that you have some great graphics in place for your FB banner etc. You want to start your group looking as well put together and professional as possible. You don’t need to pay a designer to do this, you can do it very simply using apps like Canva.

Now its nearly time to start inviting people into the group, but before you do that, make sure that you’ve embedded some great content into the group. Here’s some examples:

Have a series of webinars already set up that people can join.
Create checklists and other useful documents that your members can use.
Set up regular discussions: Monday Meet Ups, Friday Promos – it sets a theme and an expectation for what people can get from the group.

Final part … start to invite people to join!

TOP TIPS

Just remember to not add people to groups without their permission, this is really, really annoying and will likely prevent anyone from joining. Instead send a personal message, whether through FB itself or another medium … just make sure that the message is personal and not the same message sent to multiple people. It is crucial that you do this for the first 20,50, 100 people. They will be the ones that create the most engagement in your group and make new members who come to ‘look’ at the group want to stay.

Facebook Live Broadcasts

Love or hate video, it’s here to stay and the best way to get involved is FB Live. Pick a topic that you want to talk about or share with your community and press Live Video … that’s all you need to do to get started.

FB Live will allow you to build relationships with your community far quicker and deeper – it’s the next best thing to meeting people in person. FB Live gives you an opportunity to showcase both your knowledge and your personality. This does not mean that you need to be an extrovert to make FB Live work for you, all you need to do is be yourself.

As FB Live is part of Facebook, they make sure that those videos are seen by far more of your community than other videos that you post, like You Tube, so it’s a great way to reach more people.

TOP TIPS

Set up a schedule so that people know what time and days you will be broadcasting. Consistency is key. I have a regular FB Live, every Wednesday at 6am GMT on my Facebook Business Page – everyone now knows they will always find me there, every week at the same time and each week, our audience grows.

Make sure you name your FB Live each week and include a link to your website / landing page – you do this in the text as you launch your FB Live.

Create Content That People Can Share

Whether you’re creating inspirational quotes, blogs, FB Live Broadcasts or Community Groups, you want people to share them. Sharing is caring and the best way to grow your community is through recommendation.

Make sure your content isn’t just about you and promoting your business; you want to provide real, meaningful value that people want to share. Your content wants to showcase your genius, give tremendous value and leave people wanting more.

TOP TIPS

Make sure that you have links to your website or relevant landing page in all your copy.

If you’re going to do inspirational quotes, make sure they are relevant and original … your own where possible!

Remember to ASK people to share your content! Sounds simple, but it’s easy to forget. IF you want people to share your FB Live broadcasts, you have to ask people and remind them how to do it. If you want to grow your Facebook Group, you want your members to recommend other people to join. Make that easy for them to do so; not just by asking them, but also by providing them with the links that they need to share.

If you’re not already in my Facebook Group, The Freedom Collective, what are you waiting for?! 

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