Pages Tagging Pages: Good News for Organic Reach on Facebook

We are very excited today to be bringing you some good news about your Facebook page’s potential for organic reach! Being the bearer of bad news is no fun – like when text only updates got the boot, or organic reach declined – so this is a welcome opportunity.

This week, Facebook announced a new capability that will allow brands to potentially show up in the News Feeds of users who do not follow them, provided they are talking about something or someone that user does follow. In the words of Product Manager Andrew Song;

“…we’re adding a new way for people to discover conversations around topics they’ve expressed interest in.”

Here’s an example. Say you like Pagemodo on Facebook (who are we kidding, of course you do). With this new functionality, a public personality like George Takei could mention Pagemodo (which would be awesome), and his post could show up in your News Feed, even if you don’t like George Takei (yet). This means that George would get exposure to a whole new audience, just because he mentioned and tagged Pagemodo in his post.

If you’re more of a visual person, here’s an example from Facebook. We see here that Bleacher Report has tagged Dwight Howard in a post. Now some people who like Dwight Howard are seeing Bleacher Report’s post, even if they don’t like Bleacher Report, because someone they do like was mentioned by that page:

So, how can you use this to your advantage as a small business? As with any form of content marketing, you want to start with your audience and think about what interests them.

Say you’re a florist, and you want to get organic exposure to an audience of women who are looking for wedding flowers. You could find a floral image from a magazine like Southern Weddings, and post that image to Facebook. In your post, tag Southern Weddings’ Facebook page when you compliment their style. Hopefully, some of the many brides-to-be who like Southern Weddings would then see your post because it mentions a page they like. This would give you exposure to an audience of people who would otherwise have to hope would find you on their own.

As Mashable points out, personal users can already do this by tagging one another. So what already worked person-to-person now also works page-to-page. However, it still does not work person-to-page.

via