Four Steps To Beat Facebook Algorithm, Reach More Coaching Clients

 Social Media is a fantastic medium through which to get clients for your coaching and therapy business. These platforms are free for both personal and business use, but getting your post reach many people is becoming a constant challenge for many business owners.  

This is more so with Facebook, where reach with post is progressively getting worse. When you send out a post on Facebook, it is at the mercy of Facebook algorithm. With knowledge of these four steps, you can beat the algorithm and reach more of your potential clients.  

1. What is the Facebook algorithm? 

The Facebook algorithm decides which posts people see every time they check their Facebook feed, and in what order those posts show up. 

 For it's part, Facebook would like to remind us that there is no single algorithm, but rather “multiple layers of machine learning models and rankings", built to predict which posts will be “most valuable and meaningful to an individual over the long term.” 

 2. How Reach is Determined

To determine who sees your post, instead of Facebook presenting every available post in chronological order, the algorithm evaluates every post, scores it, and then arranges it in descending order of interest for each individual user, that is, your audience and potential clients. 

 This process happens every time a user—and there are 2.8 billion of them—refreshes their newsfeed. While we don’t know all the details of how the Facebook algorithm decides what to show people (and what not to show people) we do know that—like all social media recommendation algorithms—one of its goals is to keep people scrolling, so that they see more ads. 

 3. Engagement

 What does Facebook algorithm process mean for your business? When it comes to earning more organic reach, the Facebook algorithm will reward you for posting content that people engage with. It is unable to distinguish how valuable the content is, rather than the fact that a lot of people are ‘liking, commenting, viewing (if it is a video) or sharing’ the post.

 Bear in mind that as of the end of 2020, organic reach is still on the decline for businesses. The average reach for an organic Facebook post is down to 5.2%. (For the record, at the end of 2019 it was 5.5%, and the year before that it was 7.7%). So, this unrelenting downward spiral of post reach decline is obviously not great news for your business.

 To put the statistics in to a clearer perspective, the average engagement rate in 2020 for an organic Facebook post was 0.25%. That number drops to 0.08% for someone with more than 100k followers. Did you get the gist from the stats?  

4.  Pay To Play

Considering the fact that organic post reach and engagement has been on the decline over the years, it is fair to say that Facebook has declared the ‘unspoken word’, many refers to as ‘pay to play’.

 If you rely on organic reach alone to promote your business, you might be wasting a lot of your time, the one thing you don’t have, as a business owner.  

Facebook Advertising is critical if you want to reach more people with your message, your ideas and your products or services. The great thing about Facebook advertising is that, it is relatively cheaper than many forms of advertising online. Facebook Advertising is a whole new topic, which I will write about in the coming weeks.

 Pleasure to have you here. It will be nice to know your thoughts or question, through the comments box.

Beatrice x

PS: Connect with me on Social Media, @beatriceyakubumedia, in the major platforms.