Facebook Fan Pages are popping up in record numbers. Now businesses have another space to connect with their clients or customers and a great opportunity to add value.However, one thing I hear repeatedly is that Fan Page owners are frustrated with their lack of fans and low engagement levels. They work hard to create the page, add the bells and whistles, but no-one comes.
One reason for this is a lack of purpose and planning. The words purpose and planning might not get you all that excited. However, the payoff is big and worth the time. Once you put a plan of action in place (in the form of an editorial guide), the rest starts to fall into place. The result: growing fans and increasing engagement will not feel like work, but actually be an enjoyable experience. Imagine that!
How To Use Facebook Preferred Audience Targeting For Organic Posts :
If you’ve ever ran a paid Facebook campaign before, then you should be familiar with the targeting options they provide. But, did you know you can also target your organic posts on Facebook by audience? Facebook refers to the option as preferred audience targeting. Facebook targeting organic posts allows you to narrow down the audience for your post by interests, age, gender, location, and/or language.
This in effect allows you to optimize your organic reach by putting your organic posts in front of the right subset of people, and increases the chances of engagement for the post. What this does is limit the people who will see your post in their news feeds, but people who directly visit your Facebook page or perform a search will still see the post, regardless of the preferred audience targeting you’ve set up.
Here is how you can set up preferred audience targeting on Facebook for your organic posts:
1. If you have never used preferred audience targeting on Facebook before, you will need to first enable it. This can be done by navigating to your Facebook page, and clicking on Settings in the upper right hand corner. Make sure you have the General tab open on the left hand side of the Settings screen, and click Edit next to Audience Optimization for Posts. You will then check off the box next to “Allow preferred audience selection and the ability to restrict the audience for your posts.” and click Save Changes.
2. Now you can click on Page to be taken back to the timeline for your Facebook page. Click on “Write something…” to open the post creator to construct your post, and then click on the button directly below that says “Choose the preferred audiences for this post” to set up the targeting for this organic post.
3. Your first option is Preferred Audience. This enables you to limit the people who will see your post based on interests. You can choose up to 16 interests to target this post by. Available options range from business and industry to family and relationships to hobbies and activities to sports and outdoors. If you have a product or service in the animal industry, you may choose to use the hobbies and activities category, scroll down to the pets option, and limit the audience based on the type of animal your product or service is related to, such as birds, cats, dogs, or horses.
4. Your second option is Audience Restrictions. You are able to target your audience down using the Preferred Audience and/or Audience Restrictions options, allowing you to first choose an interest your post is related to, and then narrow the audience down even further based on age, gender, locations, and/or languages. You are able to limit the age from 13 to 65+, limit location based on countries, states, cities, or zip codes, and limit language, but only if the audience you are trying to reach uses a language that is not common to the location targeting you have set.
Have you noticed a decline in your Facebook organic reach?
Looking for ways to more effectively reach your audience?With changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm, you’re facing increased competition to get your content in front of your fans.In this article I’ll show you five ways to improve your Facebook organic reach.
How to Track Your Organic Traffic: To look at your organic traffic, you need to dig into your Facebook Insights. Go to the Posts tab to check out your posts’ performance for the last month. Click on See More to find out about older posts.You can track your post reach in terms of organic and paid by selecting Organic/Paid from the Reach drop-down menu.
1. Publish Evergreen Content: The lifespan of a Facebook post depends on many factors. One is its usefulness. Even an old post can show up in your news feed if your friends like, comment or share it.
For example, this update was 18 hours old when it showed up in a user’s news feed because one of her friends liked the update. It’s as simple as that.So when posting to Facebook, it’s important to create some evergreen content that will remain fresh and relevant to users for a long period of time. The more people engage with your content over time, the longer the lifespan of those posts.
2. Post Quality Content, But Less Often: We’re living in an age of content overload, and Facebook is no exception. According to Facebook, “Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300.” As a Facebook marketer, you’re fighting for one of those precious spots.You don’t need to post a high volume every day to get attention. Instead, work smarter by creating quality content. More posts won’t necessarily bring you more love from Facebook.
3. Use Organic Post Targeting to Serve Relevant Content: Facebook’s organic post targeting enables you to deliver your content to the audience most likely to engage with it. In other words, Facebook gives you the option to target your content to specific groups of fans.
Facebook offers eight options to set your target: gender, relationship status, education level, age, location, language, interests, and post end date. Select the targeting options that will help you zero in on the right audience for your content.
For example, this post is targeted to 150 fans, selected by their interests and educational status. Only the people who are most likely to be interested in this content can view it on their timeline. If this post had been targeted to all 12,000+ fans of the page, the engagement would have been much lower. Targeting posts to specific groups of fans is one way to increase your post engagement rate.
4. Post at Off-peak Hours: During times when fewer people are sharing content on Facebook, your chances of getting noticed are higher. Typically the best time to post on Facebook is 3 pm. But you can try posting at different times, depending on when your fans are online.Go to your Facebook Insights to check out when your fans are logged into the network. Then choose the hours when the majority of your fans are online and your competitors aren’t posting.
5. Choose Content Types That Resonate With Your Audience: According to a Socialbakers study published in February 2015, Facebook audiences love videos and links more than images. If you look closely at the results of the study, images get the lowest organic impressions, links and text-only status updates perform better and video is the highest impression generator of all.
But before jumping on this trend, examine your Facebook Insights to see what type of content resonates well with your audience. If you discover that your fans still prefer images to other types of content, don’t change your strategy now. Instead, introduce different formats slowly and track how they perform.
Over to You :
Facebook organic reach has gradually declined for many business pages. Try any of the tips in this article to improve the chances that your content will appear more often to your Facebook fans, through organic means.Remember to test your tactics and adjust your content delivery accordingly.
What do you think? Have you tried any of these tactics to increase your organic reach? What changes in reach did you notice? What strategies or tactics have worked best for you? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.