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!

Social media management requires a team of talent, bottom line. Our team (affectionally referred to as The #SircleSquad) is made up of many awesome individuals from our President down to our seasonal intern staff. Each plays an integral role in our collective success, and our different skills, interests and POV’s provide our clients with unparalleled support and service.

We love talented young interns with diverse skill sets and we sat down with one of them, Sara Siegel, to learn a bit more about her. Here is what we found out:

Full name and nickname?

Name: Sara Siegel. Nickname: My parents have multiple super embarrassing nicknames for me, but I refuse to put them on paper.

Age?

23

University?

Furman University in Greenville, SC. Headed to Parsons School of Design in the Fall!

Major?

Communication Studies, but will be studying Graphic Design at Parsons.

What made you choose Sircle Media?

I took one Graphic Design class at Furman and loved it but I knew that I had a lot to learn. When I came across the Sircle Media internship, I could tell that it would be a great place to learn more about Graphic Design in a field that I’m very familiar with, Social Media.

Most surprising discovery/realization after working here for a couple of weeks?

My most surprising discovery while working at Sircle Media is how much hands on work I do for clients. Every day is different and fast paced. There is never a dull moment. I truly feel like I am part of the team.

What is the best part of your internship?

My favorite part is getting to work alongside the team at Sircle Media. Everyone that works here is energetic, fun, and super welcoming. They’re also close to my age which makes the work day feel less stressful and more fun.

What can you tell us about Adam or your supervisor?

My supervisor, Carlos, is very helpful and patient when I get a little lost. I’m never nervous to ask him questions which has helped me learn and progress. Adam is an awesome boss. He always provides the interns with motivation and confidence by reminding us that we are an important part of the team.

Advice you would give to a future intern?

Be confident! There’s a reason you were hired and you have what it takes to create quality content if you put in the work.

Video content has really become a must have for any brand that is serious about leveraging social media for their business. It is very important to create content that stands out from the clutter and if you want to accelerate reach and visibility on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, then you need to get serious about moving beyond still photos and graphics in your content mix.

This video above was created for our client Michter’s Whiskey, one of our favorite clients for obvious reasons.  They have unbelievable, award winning products and a very loyal following on social media.  Since they are in the spirits business, e-commerce is not an option or part of their digital focus. For them, it is all about reach and storytelling to help them be relevant in a very crowded vertical.

A key metric for success in our engagement, is our ability to earn them consumption (pun intended) of their content marketing. We aim to create simple, yet compelling assets and then get them the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to visibility. They do very well both organically and via paid media on Facebook, because it is a well known and widely appreciated international liquor brand. That being said, they want to really stretch beyond their fan base and get in front of new eyeballs whenever they can.

Here we deployed some paid efforts ($10) to help accelerate the reach and impressions on this particular creative. We targeted users who have an interest in whiskey, bourbon and rye and earned some excellent results. Nearly 15,000 people were reached and 2892 people viewed the video within 24 hours. For reference, their photos generally earn about half of that reach number with the same type of targeting and budget allocation.

Both are important and necessary, but the videos generally add a little more gasoline to the fire…Get involved!

At Sircle Media we believe that social media efforts need to be equally distributed between content, engagement and growth tactics. It is our religion and we work diligently on this approach for our clients on a daily basis.

The collage above is an excellent example of how the three all work together and result in a smart and well rounded social strategy. On a recent call regarding content direction with our client Modern Oats, they really wanted us to focus on helping better craft their content message, as a product for the explorer/traveler/adventurer set.

We decided we would do a deep dive on Instagram to look for some content inspiration and source some influencers who we felt embodied this lifestyle and who had a sizable following from that demo.  We followed a couple of users who we felt had the right vibe and engaged with some of their content to get on their radar.  As a result of this engagement tactic, we found @_hoodoffair_ and reached out to him to start up a dialogue.

We asked if he would like to try our product and he said that he would love for us to send him some. This was done with no promise of anything other than him sampling it and providing feedback. For a photographer on the go, especially one shooting content outdoors, this product makes a lot of sense. We sent some out for him to try (and he loved it) and as a result we landed not just one, but three (one, two, three) free content posts on his account.

In the end, a content strategy call, led us to first deploy some down and dirty engagement tactics. The posts earned 8987 LIKE’s, thousands of impressions and 150+ new followers, all nice growth metrics. To take it full sircle, we also landed three beautiful images that we could then repurpose into our feed, rounding out our content efforts.

We call it: The Sircle of (social media) Life.

Facebook is a beast of a marketing platform, that drives amazing results. Period, end of paragraph.

Brands still struggle to get their head around this for some reason.  Facebook (like most platforms) gave “the goods” away for free at first (and for a long time) and once they grew up and decided it was time to make some money, people freaked out. This is a mistake, because A) of course that was coming, B) you just need to be nimble and adjust and C) if you aren’t taking advantage of this paid platform, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

I just think everyone needs a reset of sorts, to help them reassess Facebook in general. There is nothing more powerful in your arsenal and you must incorporate it into your digital plan. Remember, when you pay Facebook, you are unlocking their awesome targeting opportunities and you are guaranteeing delivery of content to a specific audience. Not partaking because you are angry that Facebook transitioned to a pay to play platform is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face. DON’T DO IT!

Take the image to the left for example. This client was running a special on Good Morning America and offering a limited time offer of 50% off, as a way to generate e-commerce sales and acquire new customers. They have a very high retention rate (because their products are awesome) and they wanted to bring in revenue to their site (for a short term $ boost) and to help create some new user profiles, that would likely translate to long term and repeat customers. It is all about Life Time Value (LTV).

To help stoke the flames of this offer, we decided to boost this timeline post to two strategic audiences for $50 each. Fans of the brand (many of whom might not have purchased on the website before) and website visitors, who had not yet purchased on their website. This means they had been to the site, but never consummated a sale.

The results: 22,000+ reached, 378 clicks and (not seen here) $953 in revenue from this one post.

This was a solid investment from an up front ROI point of view, and an excellent way to initiate the life time funnel. Now we can implement some email CRM sequences and engage them in a much deeper conversation with the brand.

Did it pay to play?  Yessir.