Organic Reach on Facebook is Not (completely) Dead
If you work in social media marketing, then you are well aware that organic reach on Facebook is real hard to come by these days. As they have moved to a pay to play model, marketers have had to pivot their approach on The Social Network and adapt to the new realities. We are big believers in paying to leverage Facebook’s powerful targeting capabilities and have written about that here in this blog.
Despite the paid approach that we deploy for nearly all of our clients, we are constantly seeking ways to game organic reach too. In a study performed earlier this year by BuzzSumo they analyzed 1Billon (yeah, with a B) Facebook posts from all types of brand and business fan pages and came up with some clear conclusions on ways to garner more engagement.
Part of our job as an agency focused on outsourced social media management, is to keep our ear to the grindstone and to research and experiment with tactics that will product results for our clients. We have found that most of these core findings are accurate and that some produce stand out results.
We’ve seen that pushing Instagram posts directly from IG to the Facebook fan page is really producing nice engagement for brands. This is even easier now, with the new roll out of brand profiles on Instagram and it is delivering positive results.
We have also found that it is drastically outperforming other tactics with regards to organic reach. Above is a screenshot from a client’s fan page that does not put any dollars towards their Facebook efforts. They have decided to invest their funds elsewhere and as a result their organic reach has been nominal. We post great content to their fan page 3-5X per week and they average 100 people reached and have almost zero engagement on their posts. Many brands without a paid strategy, are familiar with those type of poor metrics.
This week all 3 pieces of content were published on Instagram and simultaneously pushed to Facebook. As you can see, the reach and engagement numbers skyrocketed as a direct result. Going forward we are going to advocate that clients have this approach in their efforts, especially those with zero or little budget for paid efforts on FB. Now this means we’ll need to think about their Instagram content and how it might display on Facebook. Will it be sized right and will it make sense as a status there too? We encourage native storytelling by platform and now need to think about a directional flow from IG to FB that will work.
The moral of the story here is that you need to continue to experiment and iterate to find results thru social media. We read up on industry trends and studies, we remain active practitioners and we never sit back and coast when it comes to tactics. Success is contingent on a marathon over a sprint mentality and you must always be looking for ways to drive results!