If you’re managing any fan pages of brands or companies and find that organic reach is seriously decreasing in reports of social networks, this article will be helpful to you in finding out the best solutions to maintaining stable development of your fan page’s organic reach.
Organic reach happens when a post on your fan page appears on newsfeed of Facebook users. They may be fans (liked people) or friends of fans after these fans “like” the post (virality). But now just think about a case that the content which you want to send to the interested and potential customers ironically cannot be seen, read, clicked, liked, commented, shared by fans. As a result, the fan page would become a “dead hole” in spite of its millions of fans. Why? What would you do?
First I would like to calm you because that is a common problem that all fan pages are facing. Facebook is changing the algorithms on newsfeed display, which makes the posts on a brand’s fan page difficult to show. In 2012, Facebook restricted most of organic reach of brands’ fan page to 16%. In December 2013, several changes were made to make that number continue to decrease further. By the beginning of February 2014, according to the statistics from Social@Ogilvy, organic reach only ranged around 6%, that was a half compared with the one in October last year. For large pages with the huge amount of likes (about 500,000 likes), organic reach was only 2% in February. And Facebook has not officially spoken out about whether this number would be 0% or not in the near future.
But we still have a defense way to ensure the effectiveness of social media as “challenging” does not mean impossible.
Facebook said that only useful information to customers is able to display on the user’s newsfeed. Therefore, the content or fan pages which users have frequently interact with will be given priority to display compared to other pages. This is a challenge but also a key for you to overcome the challenge: Increase engagement rate – ER and the number of active fans (fans can interact with the fan page not only by like).
Content strategy: Quality over quantity
The advent of social media has indirectly promoted the development of content marketing trend. Therefore, the content with outstanding quality will make your fans constantly check your fan page and interact with the marketing content on the timeline. Hence, ER will go up.
Yet you should not post the content or images which can affect or are irrelevant to the brand. Because after all, we are building the brand, rising awareness of the brand identity, brand image and promoting purchase rather than building a community with active fans without any intention of buying.
A content strategy associated with the brand personality will be a good strategy.
You should manage and maintain this by considering the content with a overall view before posting it. Establish an excel sheet which indicates which content will be posted weekly? At which time? Which forms of the posts are (texts, photos, links, videos)?
Personalize experience for the content
The content of selecting options, consulting the customers about a product, an upcoming promotion will get more interest and more interaction. Or organizing competitions in which the participants’ photos will be presented on the cover of the fan page is also a good idea.
Walmart is a typical example for this kind.
Attracting target customers by hot content
You can use the tools like Google Trends, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress Trends wordpress or press… to know which is the most attractive to people. And the posts connecting brands and trends should be created.
For example: Consumers has been crazy for seeking their names on Coca cola cans and sharing them on social networks. You can use free tools to create a can of Coca with your name on.
Brief content for main points
If content is too long, your fans will certainly ignore it without finishing the post yet. If they want to read the full articles, they would go straight to the website instead of Facebook. So short posts will help readers get information quickly.
Forms of content
If you notice, the texts often have higher reach than images and photos have better reach than links. That’s the priority order by Facebook. However, the ER of photos and videos (shared links from Youtube) are often higher than texts.
You can refer the fan page Insight to see what kind of content is the most effective with your fans.
One tip that I found out is that if the majority of your fans like the big brands like BBC, World Cup, Coca Cola, etc,… your page will get high ER and organic reach when you shared their content. However, it should be limited because it is also a way of freely promoting other brands and it can cause your fans move to them.
Insert social media plugins on website or brand
Inserting Facebook Social plugin on your website helps those who care about you become fans and continue to update information on social networks. And keeping clients’ comments on websites by their Facebook accounts is also an advisory action. If they have been a fan of the fan page, Facebook will see it as an interaction with the brand thus the display ability of the posts will increase.
Make use of Facebook ads
You must remove the thought Fanpage-Free immediately because it is no longer true in the current context. Facebook said that if you have attractive content to your clients, you have to pay to bring that information to more people.
Just begin making plans and cost allocation for each purpose:
– Increase fans
– Increase ER
(The other purposes of facebook advertising tend to link straight to the website, which is out of discussion in this article).
Using advertisements to increase the amount of viewing and interaction with the posts will help existing fans more active and get new fans – your potential clients. And the chances of displaying your later posts on the newsfeed of fans will be higher. Facebook id or facebook email are crucial for running your facebook ads, to get it you can refer to “How to export Facebook Group Members (IDs and email facebook) to csv file?”
Effective Facebook Advertising
Facebook advertising cost for one engagement or one fan is be low and much cheaper than the cost of any kinds of traditional advertising. Now I have been able to manage cost for Facebook advertising so that one engagement is less than 0.01 USD and one fan costs only 0.02 USD. And perhaps it would be lower by efforts in the future. So how to be effective ?
First, you must identify the person seeing your ads. They must be target or potential clients with identifying features such as hobby, age, geography, gender, etc. If you know customer insight through internal reporting system (companies like Unilever, P & G have this type of data), it would be too simple. If you do not know the hobbies of the majority of your fans, do not worry as Facebook graph search will help you:
For example, if you search: “pages liked by people who like Real Madrid C.F“, Facebook will display another fan pages that Real Madrid C.F’s fans also like => find out their common hobbies. Obviously, this is just a reference for you to gain target audience more conveniently.
Second, the money you have for advertising should be divided into small amounts. Spending a large amount on an ad should be avoided because it will make you at risk if the ad does not appeal to your target clients leading low interaction but high cost. Also, this way helps you bring more than one valued content to clients.
Third, the mode “boost post” should never be at the bottom of each post in the view of admin mode. And it would be better to set each parameter manually to select appropriate viewers. One ad should be divided into two spots: one for fans to encourage their engagement and one for potential clients with similar features to fans but more attractive to draw their attention.
Hope that your fan page will be generated more effectively by thorough oriented content and advertising.