Understanding how Facebook reach works not only improves your Facebook performance, so also Fans gets to see your updates. The moment you hit publish or post button.
In this post I will take you on a journey of how to increase your Facebook performance starting with; what Facebook reach is, why your pages have little or no visibility, whereas others do, finally I will guide you through a step-by-step process to improve your Facebook reach.
Let’s start with the basics…
What Is Facebook Reach?
The number of unique users who views your post is your Facebook reach. Your REACH can influence a good number of performance measurements or metrics like engagement, likes, comments, clicks, and leads. And that’s not all.
Types of Facebook Reach
There are different kinds of Facebook reach:
- Post
- Page
- Organic
- Viral
- Paid
Let’s delve into different kinds of reach…
Post reach – is the number of people who saw a specific post in their news feed.
Page Reach – is the number of people who saw any of your post content during a given period (daily, weekly or monthly).
Organic reach – is the reach Facebook gives you for free. It happens in the news feed when your fans see your updates. There are other possibilities, such as random users visiting your page, but these are insignificant compared to news feed views by fans.
Viral Reach – is the number of people who see you’re content because someone else created a story about it. For instance, if a fan likes, comments or shares your post, their friends will see your post even if they aren’t fans of your page. The same is true if you’ve paid to reach larger audiences who may or may not already be your fans.
Paid Reach – Paid reach is a subset of post reach and is pretty easy to track and report. You paid for it, so you know where it came from. If you pay to promote your posts, your post reach is going to be much bigger than your standard organic reach (because you’ve paid to reach more of your fans).
Pro Reach Tips: don’t’ post often, and generate a high post reach, but a low page reach. Most often, chances are that you will generate low post reach, but high page reach.
For instance: when you post three to five times in a day your post gets viewed by a few people but your page reaches skyrockets. The opposite happens if you don’t post often.
But you need to decide which reach to put priority over – you either get personal posts to view from most fans or get your page shown to a lot of fans.
Measuring your Reach performance the right way
Use the When Your Fans Are Online option to find out when most of your fans are logged into Facebook, then post at that time and use that reach as your benchmark.
If the post reaches 600 people, I shouldn’t look at it as 6.3% of my page’s fans (600 people out of 9,500), but rather 17% of the fans (600 out of 3,500) who were online and reachable when I posted it. This is important when you’re explaining page performance to a boss or client. These are the results your hard work is producing!
Your Organic Reach Dropped: Here is Why?
The reason your organic reach is no longer what it used to be is – In December 2013, Facebook users started reporting a big drop in organic reach for the pages they managed. However, the organic drop varies — a set of users saw a huge drop, others saw a small drop, while many other users saw a tiny or some cases no drop.
Later on, a post from AdAge showed that organic reach decrease will continue as time progresses. And users should be prepared to pay for visibility in the news feed. Here are the info source pages that should expect their reach to continue decreasing.
Social media examiner carried out a data analysis review on more than 6,000 pages of various sizes and industries. The data showed a constant decline over the previous six months, but no noticeable drop in December (when people started reporting the issue).
At the end of it all, he discovered that – Pages with high post engagement were the least affected (if at all). Pages with a high engagement rate along with a high negative feedback score (i.e., users hide your posts or report them as spam) were more affected. Finally, pages with a very low engagement rate were affected most.
So working to increase post engagement may help you reach more fans in the news feed.
The type of content a page published also had an impact. Photo posts had the most negative effect, so if you post a lot of photos and have a low engagement rate, you’re probably suffering more than the average page.
Steps to improve your Reach
This part of the post shows you how to improve your page or post reach and get your content viewed or shown to more fans on the Facebook news feed.
- Create an evergreen content
- Post often especially when posting through the page
- Always post when your fans are most active online
- Encourage engagement
Read more on how to increase your page or post visibility in the Facebook news feed and get your content shown to more fans.
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