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20th December 2016
12:18am GMT
The Facebook news feed is constantly changing. It can seem like a massive pain in the ass for marketers and publishers trying to get their content seen but there are a few simple tips you can follow. It is however important to note that these can change at anytime as we've seen recently with the huge push Facebook are placing on their own videos for example. Done correctly though you should be able to increase your organic reach using these tips...
Photos are what the Facebook feed were built on but when they decided that too many people were spamming the feed with memes and other content that wasn't "valuable" to users Facebook started giving them drastically less reach. You'll notice a photo on it's own gets horrendous reach these days. Probably best only publishing the really special photos about once a week.
Facebook introduced video advertising at the start of the year but it is normal videos that are dominating the feed these days. This is a direct attack on YouTube and as we showed last week a video can easily reach 100,000 people and we've also found that a good video can result in you getting up to 1000 new likes to your own page. The video has to be uploaded directly to Facebook.
Youtube links used to make up a huge part of the Facebook news feed as users shared their favourite music and sports videos with friends. You could now go days without seeing one single YouTube video and that is very much intentional. As Facebook ramp up their own video service they are throttling videos from YouTube itself so don't even waste your time trying to get reach this way!
The trusted way to get likes in the past was to run competitions especially of the "like and share" variety. While Facebook have loosened the rules on competitions they have started killing the reach of pages who try to get likes using these cheap methods. I wouldn't even bother with a competition on Facebook unless you are running it through some sort of app.
Every page is different and you'll want to dig deep into your page insights to see what works for your own page. On our Lovin Dublin page for example where we talk mostly about food we know that posts with food porn posted just before lunchtime perform really well. Short news pieces usually work well between 8-9 in the morning or 6-7 in the evening when people are commuting. Nothing will decrease your reach further than poorly timed content that people don't engage with or find relevant.
Don't ask people to comment, like, share or do anything else on the post. Facebook are wise to that sort of stuff with their algorithm and will slap you down in terms of reach. As they say themselves if the content is good enough users will know what to do with it anyway without you having to prompt them.
If you can find a way to get people to tag their friends in a post that is the quickest way to drastically increase reach. Just like Google treats links to a website as a vote Facebook do something similar with tagging in posts. Remember point 6 above where you shouldn't ask people to do it but think of types of content where friends are likely to tag their friends and you will be golden.
Facebook now have over 600 million mobile users and the vast majority of us spend a lot of time on the site via a mobile device. With that in mind make sure the links you are sharing are going to a full mobile enabled site that loads quickly. It's a small factor but one that can make all the difference for reach. If you aren't sure check the link on your own mobile device first.
Some publishers or business pages think that the best thing to do is to post constantly though out the day but I find that by creating scarcity you are far more likely to get better reach. You could publish 6 posts in a row all day that get 5000 reach each or post one amazing one that gets 100,000 reach. Creating a bit of scarcity will help with Facebook reach and the knock on effect is your likes will be more engaged too. Win win.
