Ask Auntie Social: How do you boost Facebook posts without spending money?

Q: "If you don't have a boosting budget what ways can you break through the Facebook algorithm and boost the reach of your posts?" Roland Baldwin Triskle Arts Centre

A: Thank you for the great question Roland. This issue is relevant to many businesses.

There is now an average of 1,500 posts competing to appear in a user’s news feed. This explosion of content where an estimated 3 million links are shared on Facebook every hour has led to a decline in organic reach.

In 2012 a business page could enjoy a reach of around 16%, however according to the Locowise report in March of this year the average organic reach of a page with a minimum of a million likes is less than 3%. Why is this so?

Facebook’s duty is to its users and a key driving force behind this is creating the best user experience possible, resulting in higher levels of engagement.

Facebook’s algorithm will ensure that the most relevant posts find their way to the users feed which averages a total of 300 posts per feed. There is no denying that this makes it more difficult for pages to be seen.

This algorithm is complex and is subject to many changes, however Neil Patel has broken this down into a user-friendly version.

The news feed visibility is based on Interest x Post x Creator x Type x Recency

As Patel states:

Interest refers to Interest of the user in the creator,

Post: the posts performance amongst other users

Creator: performance of posts by the content creator amongst other users

Type: Type of post, status, photo, link,) users prefer

This could be broken down to:

- How recently was the post was published?

- The number of comments, likes, and shares generated.

- How often the user has interacted with the page posting the update.

- Past user interaction with the same post type.

Facebook’s aim “is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them”.

As an example, Buzzfeed have been very successful in leveraging Facebook to reach their audience, generating approximately 22% of their traffic from the platform. As well as posting very engaging content they equally spend millions of dollars on Facebook ads according to documents obtained by Gawker.

Unfortunately not everyone has millions of dollars to spend on Facebook ads. So we need to focus on strategies that could be employed to create more reach organically.

Jay Baer from convinceandconvert.com gives us suggestions on what you can do:

1. Forget Facebook and go to Google+ and Twitter.

2. Pay for advertising on Facebook.

3. Get better at Facebook.

4. Enlist others to do your Facebook marketing on their own profiles.

Strategies to help build organic reach

As a starting point to help you build momentum, Jon Loomer suggests we focus on creating and posting evergreen content. As a symbol of perpetual life, in this context it refers to content that is considered sustainable and lasting.

Examples of evergreen content could be lists such as the top 10 music acts who have performed at the Triskle, offering top tips, instructional tutorials, product reviews, videos Testimonials, or Industry resources.

Save your evergreen content into an excel sheet and date it, you can come back and reuse this content again, give it a different spin, post at a different time and thus reach a newer audience.

Evergreen content is important for your social media strategy as it provides sustainable valuable content for your followers.

You can always look back on content you have produced in the past to see what has worked well, using a scheduling tool like Edgar to uncover those that perform well and keep them in your content bank to reuse for future dates.

Create your own group

In October 2014, Facebook announced that 700 million people use Facebook groups every month.

This is an incredible number. This could be a prime opportunity for you to start your own group or join a relevant group of engaged followers that are in line with your business goals.

This could be a very clever marketing resource, as it will allow you to listen to your customers and engage with potential brand advocates.

If you are to set up your own group, do convey your value proposition in the group description as this will automatically resonate with the follower.

Do set the rules for posting on the group, it is best to have these laid out clearly from the onset.

Do set up the privacy settings to allow only your most engaged audience to become members as these will become your brand advocates. Start interesting conversations that will be interesting to your followers, don’t focus on selling or promoting your product, perhaps invite people to engage on topics related to the arts, music, drama, film which relates directly to the Triskle Arts Centre.

Your group could be a platform in which people can express their love and passion for these areas. On a side note you can pin your posts to the top if you’ve created the group to ensure that members can see your content.

Post outside of peak hours

We have all come across the peak times when activity on Facebook it at its highest.

Referring back to Jon Loomer suggestions he proposes to post outside of those peak hours, the rationale behind this strategy is that when there’s little else being shared online, your content is more likely to stand out.

For example, posting at night could help you appear at the top of the page in the morning.

Equally as a result, if your posts receive more engagement this will lend itself to Facebook distributing the post of more of your followers.

Referring back to the algorithm Patel shared, this could help with future reach and engagement. If you want to take note of the posting strategies of your industry competitors you could take a look at Fan Page Karma.

Video

Since June of last year, Facebook has achieved an average of over 1 billion video views per day.

The number of videos in Facebook news feeds has grown by 360% which resulted in Facebook’s auto-playing feature and a favouring of video updates. According to Edgerrank Checker, native videos uploaded to Facebook have become the strongest performing content in the news feed.

If you want to reach more of your audience organically uploading videos directly to Facebook would be a great way to achieve that.

On a final note, post a maximum of twice a day, and ensure it is relevant high quality content for your audience. We all love a bit of humour, inspiration or an opportunity to learn something new. It can really make someone’s day.