How to Increase Your Facebook Organic Reach in 2019

Facebook has changed.

A few years ago, you used to be able to post anything you wanted and all your page’s followers would see it in their news feeds. Then Mark Zuckerberg and his team switched things up.

Now, if you’re not posting with purpose and intent and don’t have a plan for each and every post, you’re going to get lost in the shuffle and your Facebook page is going to start collecting dust and cobwebs.

But there’s still hope!

I’m going to go over 7 ways you can increase your Facebook organic reach in 2019 (and beyond). These are tips that will survive any algorithm changes or policy updates that affect the way we interact on Facebook.

 

Post diverse content (and do it often)

 

If you’re like most small businesses I’ve seen in New Jersey, you’re not posting enough content on Facebook.

 

More importantly, you’re not posting enough diverse content to understand what your followers want to see, talk about, and ultimately buy.

 

So if you’re seeing your organic reach slip or it’s just never really taken off in the first place, it’s probably because you actually don’t know what kind of content your followers want.

 

This might be because you’re only publishing once a week, twice a week or maybe only twice a month. I see a lot of local businesses right here in New Jersey with Facebook pages that are only posting once a month and it simply isn’t enough if you want to understand what types of content your followers want to see.

 

I really recommend taking a look at posting different types of content on Facebook.  Post videos, posting images, post GIFs, post polls. Posting different styles of content and different types of topics so that you can better understand the people who follow your Facebook page.

 

If you’re not doing this, now is the time to start posting more diverse content on a much more regular basis.

 

 

Get a conversation going

 

Ask yourself this:

 

“Am I actively asking my followers for engagement?”

 

If you’re not actually creating a dialogue with your followers and you’re just publishing status updates on Facebook hoping people will share, comment and engage with it, I’ve got bad news.

 

People want to engage on Social Media, but they need to be triggered to do so.

 

Take a good hard look at your existing content on your site, whether it’s a blog post, a video, a landing page, whatever! Look at that content and think of a way to get people to engage with it and get a dialogue going on Facebook (or any social media platform for that matter).

 

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about:

 

Say you’re a local brewery – New Jersey has a booming microbrewery business, btw. So you’re a New Jersey brewery and you’re releasing a new beer next week.

 

You can easily just post a picture of this new beer in a glass and caption it with “Come on down next Friday for our bottle release.” But that’s not going to get you any traction or organic reach on Facebook. Maybe a few likes, but that’s not gonna cut the mustard.

 

Instead, use this post as a way to get your followers involved with the decision making process. Post a picture of two different designs for the bottle label and ask your followers which one they like better. Then sneak in the release date and tell them to find out which deisgn won by coming in next Friday.

 

Stimulate conversation by asking questions and getting people talking in the comments of your Facebook posts. This pushes you deeper into the newsfeed and will, in turn, get you more organic reach. Facebook loves conversations, so this is a perfect way to increase your organic reach and rasie your brand awareness at the same time.

 

 

Target the right audience

 

If I were a betting man, and I’m not but if I were, I’d say the chances that you’re not targeting the right audience are pretty great.

 

I see a lot of small businesses make this mistake. They don’t have their Facebook pixel on their website, so they’re not actually tracking people that have already seen their website. What’s more, they’re also not identifying people that have already seen their content and then advertising towards them using Facebook’s “custom audiences” feature.

 

Now if you know nothing about the Facebook pixel or you know nothing about custom audiences, I seriously recommend you go check that out. Do a quick google search for Facebook pixel and Facebook custom audiences and find out how those things work. They’re very powerful at retargeting people that have already seen your content on Facebook, or on your website and then reaching out to them with other content they might be interested in.

 

Most small businesses are not doing this!

 

They’re going after people they’ve never seen before and that’s not going to create the level of engagement necessary to drive sales and conversions. You’re going to get much more out of your efforts on Facebook if you actually target people that already know about your business and have already seen some of your content.

 

Publish micro content

 

This is a tricky one and for some reason a lot of people simply cannot wrap their heads around the concept of publishing what I call “micro content.” But it’s absolutely critical to growing your organic Facebook reach, especially as we head into 2019.

 

So what the hell is micro content?

 

Micro content is anything from images, videos, and text that condenses the basic ideas of your existing content with the intention of keeping people on your Facebook feed.

 

Take a look at your own psychological behavior and your overall behavior on Facebook and social media at large. You scroll through stuff and every so often something catches your eye. For most people, that eye-catching content doesn’t tend to be spammy links or walls of text.

 

So using this blog post as an example, I could take all these tips on increasing your organic Facebook reach in 2019 and put them as 7 quick bullet points in an image with an eye-catching bright geometric background. Throw the site’s URL at the bottom of the image and include a link to read more, directing people right to this very blog post.

 

What I’ve done is create a micro version of this blog post, but I’ve made it easy to read in under 5 seconds with a link to read a more in-depth article is the person wants to. But more importantly, I’ve made it a shareable asset. A cheat sheet that creates value to the right people who I’ve targeted (and re-targeted), and thus got my content and my reach to spread like wildfire.

 

And you can do this with all kinds of pre-existing content. Repurpose your old stuff into images, memes, infographics, etc. As long as they’re bite sized pieces of content, they do really well on Facebook and social media in general.

 

 

Open your wallet

 

At this point, I think every small business owner who uses Facebook has come to the realization that Facebook is a pay-to-play platform. It wasn’t always this way, as I mentioned at the top of this article, but that’s how it is now and so we must learn to adapt or die.

 

So many small businesses are simply not paying enough money to Facebook to actually reach their full potential audience. That’s not to say that you can’t scrape by with a lot of organic reach, which is the focus of this article in the first place. But for the most part, I’m seeing that if you’re not spending money in the right channels, you’re missing out on huge amounts of traffic and potential sales.

 

I recommend you use a strategy that a lot of poker players use: know when to fold.

 

You get a lot of poker hands in a single game and a lot of them are pure crap. So when you get a truly awful hand, sometimes it’s best to just fold rather than chase it off a cliff. It’s the same way with content!

 

You may post a lot of content on Facebook (and you should, btw). Some stuff is going to perform really well. This is the stuff you’re going to want to put money into to promote via Facebook ads.

 

Believe it or not, a lot of small business owners actually do the opposite of this. They post a piece of content and see that it’s performing poorly with little to no engagement from their followers and they think, “I need to spend some money to promote this!”

 

Wrong.

 

What you should be doing is frequently posting all different kinds of content and keeping track of what’s doing well and what’s not.  The content that does best is where you want to throw all your money. Do this as much as your advertising budget allows and see if you don’t start growing your reach by leaps and bounds.

 

 

Don’t ignore your audience

 

Nothing makes me cringe more than watching small businesses unwittingly turn people off by leaving their followers hanging on a public post,

 

I know you’ve seen it.

 

Someone either asks a question or a addresses the owner of the page on a business’s Facebook page or in the comments of a post. Rather than address this person, the page never responds and the comment just sits there like a bag of trash no one wants to take out.

 

It not only turns off the person who left the comment, but it also signals to future visitors of your page that you can’t be bothered to answer a simple question on Facebook. If you can’t answer a question on Facebook – a task that takes seconds of your time – why would I trust in your business and your brand with whatever it is I need?

 

If you’re not conversing with your followers and cretaing engaging discussion on your Facebook page, you’re doing a horrible job at being social! Doing those things keeps people coming back because you’ve formed relationships and gained trust. You might even have people visiting your page specifically to see your latest content.

 

But none of that will happen if you completely ignore your audience.

 

It’s so easy to say, “thank you for sharing” or “I’m glad you found this helpful.” Not making that minimal effort could be detrimental to your small business. So if it’s a matter of you being too busy, hire an agency or a social media assistant to handle this stuff for you because it’s an incredible way to grow your organic Facebook reach without having to do much work.

 

 

Keep doing it

 

Facebook is an ever-changing, always challenging social media platform. It’s also the most powerful.

 

Still, I’ve heard people say they’ve abandoned Facebook as a promotional tool because their organic reach is too low and they’re getting a fraction of the reach they used to get in the early days of the platform.

 

That attitude is all wrong, and here’s why.

 

Number one, it’s a losing attitude which I simply have no time for. As I said, Facebook is a powerful platform that, even today, when used properly could spell out big profits for your small business.

 

Number two, you need to keep your eye on the future and never give up. I know that sounds like some motivation poster nonsense, but it’s true. With every change in Facebook’s algorithm, there lies untapped opportunity. If you’re not first to the new game, you’re last and if you’re last, you’re dead.

 

How can you take advantage of Facebook Ads? How can you better optimize for Facebook Video and start doing Facebook Live Streams? How can you drive up engagement with the shiny new tools Facebook rolls out?

 

These are the questions you should be asking. Because as Facebook continues to unveil new features, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’re going to be rewarding businesses that utilize those new tools.

 

So don’t whine and moan about the halcyon days of organic reach on Facebook. Look at all the enormous possibilities that lie ahead and do something.