Organic reach has been declining for the past few years. In January 2018, Zuckerberg announced that they are making major changes in the Facebook algorithm. This decision was taken to reduce the excess of public content cluttering people’s newsfeed. Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be tailored towards curating content that builds meaningful relationships among people.

From a business perspective, this means that organic reach is now a myth. Lesser reach means lesser engagement, so it’s important to know how to move forward with these changes. We’ve put together a list of 5 tactics for you to gain traction on your Facebook page despite the untimely death of organic reach.

Understand The Change

Before you start planning a new strategy for your Facebook content, looking into what you’re dealing with will give you a head start over others. The changes mainly affect how your posts score on Facebook's algorithm.

The algorithm now prioritizes posts that spark meaningful interactions. Facebook made these changes to improve the quality of the time people spend on the app and be accountable for its users' mental health.

Posts from friends, family and Facebook groups are given new weight above organic content from businesses and public pages. To get traction, brands now need to earn a lot more authentic engagement (e.g., comments, reactions, comment replies—and if a post was shared over Messenger to a friend, that has some weight too.)

Knowing Your Niche

One of the first steps for any business or brand with a platform on Facebook is to research their target demography thoroughly. If you’re an already established page with a good number of followers, try looking into what type of content gets you the most amount of interaction and engagement. If you’re new to the scene, check out our blog on how to reach your target audience to get a better idea.

Having an idea about your demography’s preferences will help you put out meaningful and relevant content. The type of content that urges authentic interaction is the kind Facebook prefers. Understanding your target audience’s taste will allow you to make better-targeted content that will drive traffic to your page.

Quality Over Quantity

Even before these drastic changes in the algorithm, Facebook preferred high-quality posts over frequency. In fact, posting too much can be a bad thing. In a study conducted by HubSpot, brands with less than 10,000 followers that post more than twice a day get 60% fewer clicks per post.

The majority agree that Facebook seriously dislikes low quality and low effort content, so it’s crucial to emphasize the quality of the posts you put out.

Veteran marketers agree that one post a day is the optimal number. It keeps your followers reminded of you but not to the point of becoming an annoyance. It’s important to be consistent with your content, or else your content, regardless of its quality, won’t do well.

Focus On Video Content

Since 2019, Facebook has started prioritizing high-quality and original videos that are longer than one minute, especially videos that can hold the viewer's attention longer than 3 minutes.

The things that Facebook considers for video ranking are:

• Loyalty and Intent
• Repeat viewership
• Duration
• Originality

Posting video content is an excellent way for brands to showcase their products and services in more depth.

Do make sure not to go overboard with video content; just because it can rank you higher does mean you should post five videos a day. Mixing up static and video content will create a good balance.

Be Consistent With Curating

In the simplest terms, curating means sharing relevant content. Content curation can help you compete effectively in the current, over-saturated market.

Curating relevant content meaning your competition’s content seems a bit counterproductive. You’d be surprised at how many benefits this simple strategy can bring you. Marketers leading the field use 25% of curated content in their social media strategy. Here are some of the services curated content can get you:

• Produce Engaging Content: Curating high-quality and relevant content allows better engagement with your audience.
• Consistency: Curationfrees you of the stress of having to come up with your own content every day. You can be consistent on your page and put more effort into your original content.
• Budget-Friendly: Curation doesn’t cost a penny, so it’s a great strategy for small and new businesses.
• Introduces Variety: Curating from various sources ensures a diverse range of formats and voices.
• Industry Insights: It helps you be more aware of current industry trends and what you’re competitors are doing.

Timing Is Key

The Covid-19 pandemic has completely changed how and when interactions on social media happen. So, it’s worth noting that it has also changed the peak time on Facebook. There are two ways to approach this.

The conventional method would be to follow the recommended time.

According to Sprout Social, the best times to post on Facebook are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. The worst time to post is after 5 p.m., as people working from home tend to log off their devices and spend time elsewhere.

You could take a personalized approach and test out when your audience is most active by checking your insights or through apps like Buffer, Markopolo.ai, and many more.

Avoid Being Too Business Centric

Facebook’s decision to make these changes was because of how commercial the platform was becoming. Zuckerberg wanted to take the platform to its roots and focus on the social aspect.

As a brand, it’s hard to find a balance between commercial and communal content. A good first step would be to stop trying to get forced traction. What I mean by this is that Facebook really doesn’t like posts that say things like “Click this” or “view that.”

Focusing on engagement with your followers and putting up posts that start discussions in the comments gets you brownie points in social engagement.

_{In Summary}

Organic reach is a concept of the past, but there are ways to work around this problem with the right strategies. By knowing the ins and outs of your audience and how the updated algorithm works, it’s possible to find loopholes and use them to your advantage.

Marketing Automation Agencies- do we need them? Take a look at this article to find the answer!

‍

‍