ORGANIC WAYS TO BUILD YOUR FACEBOOK REACH WITHOUT ADS

If you’ve been on Facebook and depend on it to get your message out there, let me guess:

The organic engagement has taken a nosedive. Your reach has gotten much smaller. Maybe you're thinking about abandoning Facebook in favor of other channels such as Youtube.

If that is you right now, everyone is going through the same rough patch; the recent changes are probably a bummer. It's not just you, fear not.

Bad news:

Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon. They are the biggest #1 social network in the world with over 2.7 billion active users, and also own the #3 third-largest ( Instagram). Engagement on Instagram too has taken a big hit, and the dilemma is the same.

Here is why: Facebook in fact has been working very hard over the last year in evolving its algorithm to favor the user experience. While this is great for the user, it’s worse for the marketer. Many of the old hacks you’ve tried and worked before won’t work now. And yet you can’t escape if you’re gonna be a social media marketer. You’re going to have to come up with new ones.

Now the good news:

There are techniques (hacks if you will) that you can use to spur organic engagement on Facebook. That’s right: that means likes, comments, shares, link clicks, and page likes.

Ask Questions

You’ve probably heard this advice already.

Any question is worth asking if it is both a relevant and vital topic of interest. Either that or any controversial, or catalyzing and energizing issue that relates to your topic that's sure to generate a real organic dialogue around it. Generate a lively dialogue around the pitch you are about to make. And get them to talk first.

But whoa – not just any question. Don’t just go around throwing questions for every post, and especially if you don’t really have a relevant and meaningful question to ask members of your audience or a quick response ready for most likely replies or answers.

Brian Peters in the Science Of Social Media Buffer Podcast, suggests inviting your audience to engage in a lively debate.

"Actively involve them in your marketing process so that your team can generate new product ideas, marketing campaigns, and content topics based on the feedback you’ve received directly from the people that matter most."

Two types of questions:

Ask for their opinion.

People love to give their opinion. You can see it all over Facebook. Even better – do a survey or poll.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Don’t pose questions that make people think about their answers. YES or NO answers are often effective as they are quick and require little thought to answer. For example: “Type YES in comments if you agree!”
• Don’t use “Please share” or use the word “share” in the captions of your posts. Facebook introduced changes in their algorithm that dings the use of that word.

The fill in the blank question.

Asking fill-in-the-blank questions is an awfully effective way to promote organic engagement on Facebook.

It also goes without saying that for every question you ask the members of your community in your post, be prepared to respond quickly to comments, which is crucial. It’s a 2-way street.

Facebook also allows you to post a question in the form of a poll, which you can learn more about here.

Ask for help

You probably weren't expecting this. Dreamglow suggests,

"Ask for tips and advice. Ask existing customers to describe their experiences with your brand and give advice and share tips on how to get the most out of your products and services."

Use Emoticons

Using Emoticons increases Engagement.

Emoticons tend to add a more human touch to your posts, and stats repeatedly show their usefulness isn’t limited to SMS text messages. On social media platforms including Facebook, it seems like this comes across fairly well with users as well.

Use More Video

That was a no-brainer, wasn’t it? If you’ve been on Facebook recently, you’ll see a shift towards more video over images, audio, or plain text.

There are several reasons you should use more video for your posts:

The Facebook algorithm favors video, so you get bumped up a notch in their eyes just for using video. That should be reason enough to do it. But wait – there’s more!

Moz writes in Facebook vs Youtube, “according to Cisco Forecast, video use is expected to rise to 79% by 2021″.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, and edited, or even edited at all. The trend now is more towards a video that is real, “live”, and not overly edited.

A Word On Videos (Facebook and Youtube are rivals)

Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook and doesn’t want you to click a link that takes you to another website. Although they don’t explicitly admit it, it wouldn’t be a surprise why their algorithm favors video.

According to Forbes, videos shared natively on Facebook – meaning one of two things:

1. Facebook Live video
2. A video that is uploaded directly to Facebook.

Native video performed over 10x better than video uploaded to Youtube and then shared as a link on Facebook.

Facebook native videos received a 1055.41% higher average share rate than Youtube videos

Do A Little Homework

Before you start posting, do a hashtag search on Facebook. On the right side of the page, you will see a list of trending hashtags. See where you can incorporate some of these trending hashtags into your content whenever possible.

Sharing is Caring

Time is of the essence with this tactic. The first 1 hour of your post has the most bearing on how much reach it will have. The first 10 minutes of engagement (or lack thereof) will mean the difference between your post’s shelf life being extended a few hours or rapidly disappearing in users' feeds. Make the first hour, and especially the first 10 minutes count.

Share the post on your personal Facebook profile. Then send some of your friends a direct message including a link to the post asking them for their support.

Open Facebook Messenger and paste the link to your newly published post into a message. You could say something like: “Hey I would really appreciate it if you would share this with me. It would help me because _______”. You get the idea…

Originally published on https://kevinnaruse.com/social-media/organic-ways-to-build-your-facebook-reach-without-ads/