It’s no secret that large social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are increasingly operating on a pay-to-play model. What this means is that your regular, non-boosted posts may see a decline in organic reach (and other key metrics like engagement and impressions for that matter).
These social media platforms are trying to encourage businesses to pay for ads or boosted posts on their platforms, but there are a few things you can do to help increase your business’ organic social media reach and outsmart their algorithms.
Post the Right Content
All content is not created equal. Posts that are formatted as videos, include images, or incorporate GIFs are favored by social media platforms over posts that are text only. Beyond that, make sure that the video, photo, or GIF your page posts is high quality.
Once your media-rich post is live and gets past the algorithm, these posts are more likely to make your audience stop, look, and pay attention to what you have to say on the post too, which is ultimately your goal.
Use Analytics to your advantage
Are you posting on your social media channels when your fans are logged on? If you aren’t, you should be. Once a post is live, social media platforms look at early post performance to decide if the post is valuable (i.e. getting likes, comments, and views) or if the post is a dud that should not be getting pushed out to your fans’ feeds.
The analytics section on your business’ social media page can give you key audience insights like age, gender, and times when your fans are online.
Related to this, once your post is live, when users comment and engage with the post or your brand page, make sure you are prioritizing responding to them in a timely manner.
Switch it Up
While posting the right content matters, don’t get stuck in a rut of always doing the same thing. Don’t post a single style of creative every time you post, it will slowly but surely stop performing organically.
Instead, if you find your business posting a lot of videos, try incorporating still photos. If you typically choose a photo to post, try adding a video.
Social media platforms are constantly evolving and adding new post formats, such as Instagram’s new Reels, so utilizing these can be an easy way to play around with content while showing the algorithm that your business posts valuable and unique content that is worth pushing out to users’ feeds.
Increasing your business’ organic social media reach is a marathon, not a sprint, so begin incorporating these best practices and monitor the results over time and tweak your approach as needed for your specific business pages on each social media platform.
The average Facebook post reaches only 5.5 percent of your page followers.
Do you need to start marketing your company on social media, but aren’t sure how to get started? Or maybe you’ve been posting content but can’t seem to get the results you want.
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