العربية
About Me
If you manage a Facebook page for a business, organisation, shop or any other type of page, you probably noticed that number of people seeing each post of you has significantly dropped; actually most pages faced a drop of 40-90% in reach, which is very huge. The question for any Facebook marketer is, how can I deal with this?
Facebook has announced in its official blog that Pages posts reach will drop significantly and continuously; to be more specific, reach for each post will drop from a previous 15-20% to a max of 1-3% of total fans, and the reasons are:
Number of people and pages on Facebook has increased big time compared to few years ago, meaning that number of posts published on Facebook has increased too. As a result, Facebook claims that in any moment you open your news feed, there are around 1,500 posts eligible to appear in front of you. This is BIG!
With this huge amount of posts, Facebook wants to show users content that interests them the most; for example, people are on Facebook mainly to connect with their friends and family, and get entertained, so Facebook gives these personal posts more visibility compared to pages, and page posts will be evaluated according to how much each user interacts with the page and its posts, and which page posts he’ll like to see more.
After the significant reach changes Facebook made on December, businesses saw that as a threat for their investment on the network; after all, they didn't pay tens and hundreds of thousands of Dollars so they have to pay more to reach fans they already acquired, and so that they reach only 3% of their fans.
So what many businesses did was they reduced their investment on Facebook, cutting its ads budget, when others started experiencing with workarounds to increase reach; some of them used “Offers” extensively and in wrong way to increase reach, and other started posting more than one photo with each update to do the same. Note that these methods are temporary and using them the wrong way will definitely harm the page on the long run.
The solution was, is and will always be awesome and unique content, and how to drive engagement with it; after all, Facebook is a place where people are there to connect with each other and have fun: sell, and you’ll lose. Engage, and you’ll win.
Here are some tips that will help you improve your pages after December changes:
The reach under each post is the reach of that post only, not the whole page, but it’s more important to have a look at how many people your page reached each day. Away from reach, there are more important indicators for page success, for example, although reach has dropped, but people reached are the ones more interested on your updates, and engagement quality is better.
If you focus on publishing too many links, or share content from other pages, it’s time to change!
Start focusing on content that your fans will love and engage with; the higher the engagement, the better the reach. Don’t focus on instant results, and think of your page as a long-term investment that might not give you good ROI now, but the more care you give to it, the better it will become with time.
Facebook has clearly stated after the new News Feed Algorithm changes, that if you want to reach more people, you have to pay more and more for it.
I believe this was expected, and it shouldn’t be bad for marketers; Facebook has become a very strong marketing channel, so think of it like this: if you spend dollars on marketing on any channel, it is definitely worth to spend some of it on Facebook.
One tip I give for page owners is, if you have good number of fans, don’t just focus your budget and efforts to increase them, rather, focus your budget on promoting good performing posts to reach the maximum of interested people. For example: if you publish 10 posts a day, analyse the best performing ones (in term of engagement and reach) and promote them; this will allow maximum reach of interested people with the least budget possible. And of course, always keep an eye on Facebook latest updates on ads, they might really help you in your efforts.
Some steps you can do for example to increase reach, engagement and CTR on your shared links:
Re-write link’s title to be more attractive for people to click on it. Have a look at this ebook that will help you achieve this.
Make sure to upload an attractive image with the link, with 1200x627 size.
Facebook has recently added the ability to use Call To Actions with links shared, so you can add CTAs like “Download, Learn More”. You can add these CTAs from Power Editor only.
Although Facebook is the most popular social network in most countries, it’s not the only one. There are some other strong social networks worth investing in, such as Twitter, and the growing Instagram. Being on more than one social network will ensure continuation and not being connected to only one network’s problems.