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.

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10 Ways to Overcome Facebook’s Organic Reach Problem

It's no secret that getting a decent percentage of organic reach on Facebook is no easy task. Then again, it hasn't been since at least 2012. Yet the interwebs are filled with folks who are still constantly screaming about this fact and bemoaning that no one sees their posts.

There are ways to overcome this problem. You don't have to give up and whine. When you look at your personal Facebook news feed, there are promotional posts from companies and sites that you want to see, right? I know there are in mine. They don't get there by accident, and yours won't get in others' feeds just because you decided to post something, either.

Success is about overcoming problems, not the absence of them. Choose to succeed with your social campaign, and be ready to do what it takes to make that happen. Here are 10 things that just might help you do that.

1. Get Over It

Before moving on and sharing what wisdom I've gleaned from here and yonder about this subject, first let me tell you to stop your whining. It doesn't help. Facebook has a reason for their organic reach policy. Imagine if there were no filter on your TV broadcast for what kind of or how many commercials could come through. You'd never see another program.

There are over 18 million business Pages on Facebook, and they all want your eyeballs seeing their posts. Without good filters, your news feed would become unbearable. Also don't forget that Facebook is a company that created a site that you use. Remember your place - nothing but a consumer. You either like their rules or you take your ball and go play somewhere else, but stop complaining about how they run the business that they own.

2. Get Out More

Facebook is not the only hangout in town. You should be making the rounds through the neighborhood - window shopping at Pinterest, catching up with the news on Twitter, geeking out at Google+, doing some business on LinkedIn, you get the idea. It's called a well-rounded social media marketing strategy.

I am definitely not recommending that you abandon Facebook; that would be insane from a business perspective. However, if you get more attention on Twitter or Pinterest, then I do recommend focusing more energy there. You can improve your Facebook reach, but you have to assess where your time and effort are best spent. A social media dashboard for cross-network posting is a must.

3. Do It the Old Fashioned Way

Remember back before social media when you had to make friends *gulp* in person? People are still people, even when they're online, so whatever might be annoying in a real conversation is going to be annoying in their news feed as well. People like interesting, not overbearing. People like nice and sweet, not abrasive and depressing. Use your common sense and turn your broadcasting into a conversation. Be interesting and engaged.

4. Flip Your Timing Around

Somebody had to do it, and that somebody turned out to be Jon Loomer. He decided to see what would happen if he started posting when his largest audience was offline instead of online, and the results were awesome. There are several possible explanations for this.

One is that with less people online, less people are posting, because they're all following whatever schedule their favorite social guru has told them will work - peak times. Posting off-peak increases your chances of reach in many cases, and may even extend your post's time at the top of the feed because of engagement during off-peak hours.

5. Understand Business Expenses

Facebook's explanation for lower organic reach and how to overcome it is always the same: buy ads and promoted posts. Guess what? They're right, to an extent. Facebook needs to make money just like any other business, or it will cease to be. Selling ads and promoted posts makes them money, and they like people that make them money. These are not a magic pill, but they certainly help and are, imho, a necessary expense of any business.

6. Bypass the Third Party

Create your own webspace that people can/will visit independent of the social networks. Use Facebook as a recruitment tool to guide people into your own community. These communities are treasure chests of information because they are a direct pipeline to your customers with no one acting as a middleman. You can also create your own mobile app for that direct contact.

7. Ask Interesting Questions

I don't know anyone who has the time or inclination to stop and answer ridiculous or rhetorical questions in their news feed. "IRS caught in new scandal. Do you think the IRS a corrupt institution?" Really? I'm expected to answer that? Why not pose something like "Shower survey: water or no water?"

Questions are one of the best ways to engage your audience, but you want to ask a question that will strike some chord in them and make them think, but not for too long. A really cerebral question can have the same end result as a stupid one. Make them think slightly and make it interesting, and see if you don't get more responses and shares. Check out the surveys that get shared left and right and take cues from them.

8. Go Back to Email

Did you know that email marketing is still the most effective form of digital marketing, hands-down? Yes, even in 2014 that is still the case. Build a solid email marketing campaign and then push them to like your Page in the email. Use your mailing list to seek them out on Facebook and engage them directly.

9. Emulate the Big Boys

Fortune 500 companies know what they're doing when it comes to almost anything in marketing. It's their lifeblood, and they take it seriously. Follow the pages of some of the big companies that are very successful on Facebook and see what they're doing. What kind of posts do they use? How often? Do they respond to comments? You might learn a thing or two.

10. Images, Images, Images

What gets shared? That's right, images get shared. Pictures, videos, infographics, repeat. If you aren't posting interesting, cute, or emotion-invoking images regularly, you don't understand the rules of the game. The more self-explanatory the picture is, the better. Not that text should be left out, but some pictures require no caption, and those are the ones that will spread the quickest.

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How to Improve Your Facebook Marketing Using Facebook Insights

By using the Facebook Insights spreadsheet download or one of these free tools, you can calculate and compare metrics and percentages to find ways to improve the performance of your Facebook page and its content.

#1: Recover Your Fans Reached Percentages

Fan Reach is probably one of the most important metrics to follow to measure the performance of your Facebook page.

You spend a lot of time and energy to recruit your fans so you want to make sure they see your content.

When the percentage of your Fans Reached is below average, but your Engagement and/or People Talking About scores remain good, your content isn’t the problem. The issue is that EdgeRank no longer shows your content in the news feed of your fan base.

In this example, the percentage of People Talking About is above average, the percentage of Engagement is slightly below average, but the percentage of Fans Reached is way below average. This is a sign that the quality of the content is not the main issue. Fans were lost along the way and you need to get back in front of them again.

In this situation, the best solution is to use promoted posts and sponsored stories to get your new content in front of your fans again, have them engage and fix your EdgeRank.

Your Fan Reach should quickly go back to normal and you won’t have to invest in promoted posts and sponsored stories for too long.

Takeaway: If your Engagement metric is relatively good, but your Fans Reached and People Talking About metrics are lower, then consider using promoted posts and sponsored stories to get your content in front of your fans again.

#2: Regain Your Organic Reach

Fan Reach is a subset of Organic Reach. Because Organic Reach includes people who visit your page or view your content on a widget, but aren’t fans yet, it has to be higher than your Fan Reach. But sometimes it’s the same as or just slightly higher.

For Page 1, Organic and Fan Reach are almost equal, which shows that very little visibility comes from outside the news feed. For Page 2, Organic Reach is more than twice as much as Fan Reach, which shows the healthy generation of traffic from outside the news feed.

If this is the case, you’re not sending enough traffic to your page from outside sources.

Use a Like box or another call to action to put your Facebook page and its content in front of people who read your newsletter or visit your blog or website.

Having a Like box on your blog or website is a good idea. Include your content stream to give more visibility to your latest Facebook posts.

As more people are referred to your page from outside of Facebook, your Organic Reach rises farther above your Fans Reached metric.

Takeaway: If your Organic Reach metric is only slightly higher than your Fans Reached metric, work on sending more traffic to your Facebook page.

#3: Raise Your Engagement Levels

Engaged users (or consumers, as Facebook calls them) are the people who click on your content to view a photo or play a video. They are also clicks that lead to a like, comment or share. These types of clicks turn your engaged users into “storytellers.” The People Talking About metric is referred to as storytellers.

Storytellers are a subset of engaged users, which means that you’ll always have fewer storytellers than engaged users. On average, 20% to 35% of engaged users are storytellers.

On average, the percentage of storytellers compared to the number of people engaged varies between 20% and 35%.

If your percentage of storytellers is below this average, you’re good at getting people to notice your content, but not good at making them react to it with a like, share or comment.

To generate more engagement reactions, tweak your content to ask questions,publish content worth sharing and compel your fans to like it! Next, do an audit to spot existing content that’s doing well and create similar posts in the future.

As the average number of storytellers per post rises, so does your viral exposure. If you do an excellent job, the number of storytellers could even be nearly as high as the number of engaged users.

The best-performing pages can even have a percentage of storytellers very close to the percentage of engaged users. That means that almost all engaged users created a story, which is great news for the page!

Takeaway: If your People Talking About metric is lower than the 20% average of your Engagement metric, tweak your content to encourage more reactions.

#4: Lower Your Negative Feedback Numbers

Negative feedback has a great impact on your EdgeRank and should be closely monitored. A page with good content but high negative feedback has a lower reach than a similar page with the same level of quality content but lower negative feedback.

Negative feedback doesn’t necessarily mean that your content isn’t good. It does mean that the number of people who don’t want to see your posts is too high. This may be because you post too often, or because the “voice” of your brand makes some people feel uncomfortable.

For example, a charity that helps homeless people find a home had a very strong voice that shed light on poverty and the unfairness of certain situations. While the tone seemed to work well for a TV or print campaign, 0.4% of people didn’t respond well to the stories in their news feed.

The percentage of negative feedback was 4 times higher than the accepted average and had a negative impact on the page’s reach.

On average, negative feedback is 0.1% of the number of people reached. If you are above that threshold, your viral reach will be affected.

The page began to focus on the success stories the charity was able to contribute to, rather than the injustices it was fighting against. In less than a month, negative feedback fell back to normal, Organic Reach increased by 25% and viral reach increased by 80%.

If your average negative feedback is too high and your content isn’t spammy, try changing your “voice” and test new content strategies.

Takeaway: If your negative feedback metric is higher than 0.1% of the people your page reaches, try a new content strategy.

#5: Increase Your Clicks

Occasionally, the number of engaged users doesn’t seem to translate into clicks through to your content.

When you have good engagement and a very high percentage of storytellers, but very few clicks, the goal is to publish more "clickable" content.

The issue relates to the value of your content and its ability to encourage users to click on that content. Remember that clicks are tracked only when users watch a video, enlarge a photo or click on a link in your post. Also, clicks are one of the actions EdgeRank looks at to rank the affinity between your page and your fans.

In the spreadsheet downloads of your posts' insights, view how people clicked on your content by content type.

To encourage more clicks, publish more videos and images and don’t forget toinclude links in the text used to describe your photos where appropriate. If you publish a lot of photos, the second step is to work on the quality of your photos so people want to see a larger version and not the small one that the news feed displays by default.

Inserting text into pictures is a tactic some pages use with great success.

When users click more often to view your videos, images and content, you also get a higher EdgeRank score!

Takeaway: If your Click-Through Rate metric is much lower than your Engagement metric, remember to make your videos, photos or links worth clicking on.

#6: Extend Your Viral Reach

Viral Reach is the number of people you reach because your fans like, comment on and share your posts.

Unfortunately, viral metrics have been removed altogether from the new Facebook Page Insights since September 2013.

You can find Viral Reach metrics under the Key Metrics tab. It’s labeled Lifetime Post Viral Reach.

If you want to have more visual graphs, you can also find Viral Reach metrics in third-party analytics tools, which still have access to that data via the Facebook API.

Viral Reach varies significantly from one post to another.

Improving your Viral Reach metric recruits new fans and increases your page visibility with people who don’t know your brand. For some pages, Viral Reach is a greater indicator of visibility than Fan Reach.

On average, Viral Reach equals 25% of Organic Reach. Pages with many engaged users and storytellers can have a Viral Reach greater than Organic Reach!

Viral Reach is influenced by likes and comments, but most affected by shares. This is because EdgeRank doesn’t show most likes and comments in the news feed, but it does display all the shares. For this reason, a share has much more weight than the other engagement actions.

If your Viral Reach is below average, you need to make sure your content is worth sharing. Here again, you need to audit your existing content and see which pieces triggered the most shares, and find out why.

For example, when you post numbers or use good-looking infographics, you’ll get more shares than plain text or links. The reasons infographics motivate fans to share are too varied to provide one-size-fits-all advice. Test for what works and what doesn’t and track this comparison often.

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