In July’s newsletter, we wrote about how you can easily grow your organic reach on Facebook by sharing links via photo posts rather than sharing them via URL. Below you’ll find those steps laid out for immediate results, along with four more easy tips to quickly double or even triple your organic reach on Facebook.
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- 1. Post Photos, Not Links. Rather than copy-pasting a URL to Facebook’s text box for posting, click Photo/Video. Independently upload an eye-catching pic that goes with your article. Then paste the link into the text box for the photo post. Photo posts always have more organic reach on Facebook than the standard “What’s on your mind?” text posts, so it’s an easy way to double or triple the eyes on your article and boost traffic to your site.
- 2. Post Selectively. How your posts perform overall matters when it comes to your future reach. So rather than post many times and hope that something works, it’s better to be very selective about what you’re posting. Make sure to create strong content that’s going to truly engage your audience. With a high rate of engagement per post, your posts are more likely to get boosted in the future. Less is more on Facebook, as long as it’s always your best work and shared with an active core group of fans, friends, and followers.
- 3. Encourage Readers to Like and Share. Since engagement with posts is so important, it doesn’t hurt to actively encourage your readers to help promote a post. Sometimes it’s as simple as suggesting that they like or share a post if they enjoyed it. The time-honored call to action still goes a long way in a forum like Facebook. There are also plenty of creative and funny ways to inspire interaction with a post, from challenges and questions to games. It also helps simply to be visible and engaging yourself, to create and facilitate conversations and community on posts.
- 4. Invite Fans to Visit Your Page. By liking and following your page, your followers naturally get your posts sent to their News Feed. But it doesn’t mean they’ll ever see them. Business pages are typically ranked below posts from friends and families, as well as paid content. But if your fans are regularly going directly to your page, they’re more likely to engage with your content in general and it’s more likely to be linked to their profile as a high-interest page and bumped in their News Feed in the future. There are plenty of ways to invite people to visit your page. One way we like is posting a new album of photos and inviting fans to check it out (especially if it’s an event that some fans may have attended). Sometimes people will also go directly to a page if it lists exclusive sales and deals.
- 5. Post Off-Peak. It’s tempting to post when your followers are very active on Facebook, but that’s when you’ll be competing for their attention and are likely low on their News Feed. You can simple post during slow hours (like the middle of the night) or use a trick we love, which is to follow all of your biggest competitors and monitor their posting schedules for a few weeks. Slip into the cracks in their armor to pick up good time slots when you’ll have your audience’s undivided attention.