Remember when you first set up your first Facebook Page for business? Things were chummy then. You’d get more likes on your posts than you ever imagined. Your growth was organic. By golly, the folks in your feed actually saw your content.

Facebook is not an easy score anymore and has shifted completely towards paid advertising as the only avenue to sustain “decent” exposure i.e. likes, comments, shares tags. If you’ve seen these drop who can blame you for feeling that your operating currency on social media lacks value.

But instead of being oh-so-nostalgic about the lost power, you’ve got to figure out the next strategies to reclaim some of your organic reach.

Is Organic Reach Even Possible to Increase Engagement on Facebook?

OK! You would have to been hiding under a rock not to notice how Facebook loves video posted directly onto their page as opposed to linking back to another competitor’s platform. Here’s an example.  If linking a Facebook post that contains your video and driving traffic to your blog then expect to reach less  17% of your audience organically. If you paste content links to your YouTube channel? That’s even worse, on Facebook your content will be seen by only 8-11% of users.

But here is where knowledge is real power. You can continue to drive people to your blog but you should rethink how you use Facebook Lives and Stories. Firstly, users tend to spend 3X more watching live broadcasts than interacting with posted videos. You can do organic stuff, like record stories in a vlog style or have a more structured approach to your Lives. For instance, I enjoy doing live streaming, showing slides, and having a more polished look when I am doing my tutorials on Facebook and YouTube and for that I use a platform called E-camm Live. I’ll post the video below so you can see what I mean.

When posting  videos be aware of the basic rules according to Tech Crunch
1. If you’re a vlogger fashion & beauty videos rank as the second-best topic in terms of generated engagement, coming second to food.
2. The best video length is 3  minutes or more when posting directly to Facebook, especially since you can now monetize your content on the platform. Do everything you can to learn and get familiar with Creator’s Studio.
3.  Live videos generate the most engagement when they are 5-6 minutes long. If you are doing tutorials in nature and it’s visually stimulating add 10 minutes more. Facebook’s algorithm is now is rewarding longer pieces content
4. Facebook Live videos generate 1043 interactions on average vs. 928 average interactions for Facebook videos.
5. Keep the text intro. short – around 61 characters – to encourage users to dive straight into watching. 

At our studio, we are always finding ways to repurpose our visual content. We may post a video in a blog one week, and then upload it directly to Facebook the next and then use a picture from that same post and repost is on week three. One piece of content can be shared over three weeks and no one is the wiser except you, and believe me, your engagement numbers will be looking so much better you won’t even care.

Get lean with the frequency of your posts. One of my top recommendations is don’t post every day and you certainly don’t have to post three times a day like we used to do.

Here’s why.

Facebook says it has placed more emphasis on individual interactions with your content, rather than how frequently you broadcast random thoughts to the world.

Translation: Put out quality work, work that generates a response – share, click, like and comment and Facebook will identify it as already “popular” content and start displaying it to more and more people who may also find it interesting.

The Good News? You don’t have to write as frequently or share things as frequently

The Bad News? Hop on over to my next point.

Community building is hard work, well not hard, more like consistent. If you have a minute to check out our Facebook page and scroll over to what our fans say to us, you’ll notice two things. We address everyone by their first names and we make sure that each response to each comment is different. There is no cookie cutter feedback in our comment block.

Social interactions are of utmost importance to Facebook, we can’t stress that enough! Want to increase your reach? Then get your hands dirty in the comment section replying to every single member of your community.

Oh and don’t forget to remind your most loyal readers that they can update their notification preferences from your page in order to see your newly published content first.

When you run a lifestyle platform as we do, it’s a given to be constantly serving many different publics with many different needs.  Fashionistas don’t always love travel tips and vice versa. Entrepreneurs want their success stories straight without the chasers. You get the picture. The same, I suspect is true if you are a company with multiple brands serving different demographics or a small business owner offering multiple services.  Since Facebook values engagement per post and that engagement is generated by the audience/fans who find your content relevant, then you’re going to have to niche your content to get more organic likes.

By narrowing down your audience, you help ensure that the right people see the right kind of content and engage with it. You can test different audience settings for different types of posts to see what works best in terms of reach.