Quick Tips for Maximizing Facebook Reach
Guest Blog from Wells Print & Digital Services
For many businesses and organizations, Facebook can be an incredibly valuable tool for brand development and connecting with their fans for a relatively low expense. Whether you’re an international brand or a family-run small business, the ability to convey a personal side to your business is a necessary step in this growing age of digital marketing. Knowing how to effectively use Facebook, however, is a skill that requires a creative mind, in-depth analysis, and no shortage of patience.
To determine your reach (how many people see your posts) Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank. EdgeRank is used to determine what content appears on a user’s News Feed based on how they interact and engage with certain content. For example, if you tend to like a friend/page’s posts on a regular basis, their posts are more likely to appear higher and more frequently in your News Feed later. So if you, as a brand, want to ensure that your posts continue to reach as many people as possible, your aim should be to make your content as engaging as possible.
Here are some tips on how to do that:
1. Use photos. Its no secret that Facebook is becoming a more visually-based platform. With the advent of cover photos, larger photos in both the Timeline and News Feed, and their acquisition of Instagram, Facebook is fully embracing the visual bias of the Internet. While definite numbers tend to vary from study to study, they almost unanimously point to the fact that adding photos to your posts result in substantially higher engagement rates. In fact, several Facebook executives have come out and said that the most engaging posts are typically short, personal text coupled with an appropriate photo.
2. Monitor. For brand pages, Facebook Insights provides succinct yet crucial information as to the effectiveness of our posts and how they engage our audiences. For each post, they provide us with the reach (how many people saw your post), engaged users (the number of people who clicked on or were engaged with your post), and the number of people talking about your post (how many people liked, commented, or shared your post). The more people that engaged with the post, the more people will see it later. The higher number of people “talking about” your post, then there is an even HIGHER chance of your posts being seen in the future.
3. Have Fun. While advertising is slowly becoming a larger and larger part of the experience, Facebook was built as a social interaction tool and is most effective when used as such. The brands with the most success on Facebook have done so because they have moved on from traditional product marketing by using a more personal and casual approach. Try to stay away using Facebook exclusively as another medium to spurt out products and services. Go at it with a more casual outlook and let your fans and customers see who YOU really are.
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