Making the most out of organic reach on Facebook

A lot has been said about Facebook’s organic reach. The most unpleasant thing of them is that the platform’s organic reach is dead. Yes, you heard it right. A lot of experts have claimed that they have not been receiving the same level of responses as they used to because Facebook chose to diminish its organic reach to push its advertising products.

A lot in this scenario is very much true: Facebook has indeed changed the working of its organic reach in order to drive people more towards its advertising products. It has been very successful as well, now because Facebook now drives a large chunk of its revenue from its advertising products and services.

But organic reach on Facebook is not dead. However, it works differently now. Facebook considers a lot of factors now to give you the best reach possible. But it only does so if you have a considerable number of followers. That means, organic reach becomes better once you start to grow your fan following. Whether you choose any medium to do this, either handing out free invites or running paid ad campaigns for followers, both are equally effective.

How Organic Reach works on Facebook?

Consider the formula:

F= (I x P x C x T x R)

Here, F= Facebook’s organic reach I= stands for Interest in the Post, or we can put it as Content Quality that is able to appeal to most of its intended audience P=Post Type, whether it is an image based post, text based post, video posted on Facebook or any other type. C=Creator, the profile/account/page of the person creating the post T= Time of Posting R=Recency, that is, how fresh the post is.

Let’s have a look at them one by one.

Interest in the Post

Irrespective of the platform, content quality always reigns supreme when it comes to maximizing organic reach and appealing to lots of audiences. Good content which is designed to help people will always be appreciated and will be shared more, thus building its reach. If efforts are made to make the posts interesting, people with less technical knowledge will be able to relate to it. This can be done by following educational or entertaining approach to design the posts, both are equally effective to capture the interests of masses.

Post type

Some content formats are preferred by people over others. As for example, content with images tend to perform four times better as compared to text based content only and content with links. Similarly, posts with video content capture the attention of a lot of audience, they are 8 times more visually appealing as compared to text based content. The preferential treatment that a video content gets is so high that if you design a landing page for, lets say, a software, and place an instruction manual and an explainer video side-by-side to explain its functionality, a majority will prefer to watch video instead of reading instruction manual.

Creator

The page from which the post has been created also determines its reach. There are a lot of chances that if the previous posts of a creator have been performing better in terms of reach, his next post will too and so will his future posts. This is the reason why some Facebook pages keep on growing over time organically without any paid efforts. This is a bias introduced by the Facebook that favors influencers/people with lot of followers and enables them to have an increased reach.

Time of Posting

The time of posting matters a lot when it comes to building reach and grabbing eyeballs. Businesses with a B2C orientation of products or services should focus on time between 10AM to 12 noon. The next feasible time Slot is between 2-4 PM then 5 to 6 PM. For B2B businesses 10:00 AM in the morning is ideal posting time. Then, between 2 to 3 PM and then 5 to 6 PM is the ideal posting time for maximizing reach of B2B businesses.

Recency

In the case of Facebook, reach depends on lot on how frequently your post. Facebook works best when you post twice a day for seven days a week which makes 14 posts in a week for gaining maximum reach over time. If you follow this pattern continuously, you can gain enough traction and your account it will attract more followers than ever before. Moreover, this will keep your page fresh which means that your followers will have a lot of content to interact on which will assist in building engagement with your page.