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Fire Up Your Organic Facebook Marketing – Learn, Adapt, Succeed
Recent Facebook updates could result in your posts achieving reduced organic reach over time
We are often asked whether social media marketing is worthy of much time and effort.
Many of you have probably tried to market your business on one or more social media platforms. A few boost posts, an ad campaign, or perhaps you have committed to a full content strategy with daily posts, polls and competitions, pushing your brand in front of 1,000’s of Facebook users but are now wondering why it isn’t helping you to achieve your goals.
Frustrating? Most certainly. A waste of time? Possibly. But let’s suppose you spend some time get totally clued up on the mechanics of Facebook. You learn how it works. You learn how it can help you to achieve your goals. You adapt your strategy. You achieve greater success. It can be done. It just takes some time investment to truly understand how it all works.
I attended a great webinar last week, presented by Samantha English of the Retail Marketing Academy in the US. The webinar, Leverage the Power of Facebook & Instragram provided some really useful nuggets, which if integrated into your strategy, could make a huge difference to the way you market your business on Facebook.
I would always advise running with 2 strategies on Facebook – organic and paid. This blog will explain how you can achieve a wider reach with organic posts but we will cover paid Facebook advertising strategies in our next blog.
The webinar revealed:
60% of consumers visit a Facebook page before visiting a bricks and mortar location.
80% of consumers are more inclined to buy if a Facebook page is associated with the business.
62% of consumers say Facebook is the most important and useful social media channel to research small businesses.
An average Facebook user checks their newsfeed 11-15 times a day.
Your business could miss out on over 50% of potential consumers by not having an active presence on Facebook.
We want to help you to fire up your organic Facebook marketing. There are many companies out there who really do generate a lot of new business via social networks, in fact some totally rely on it for lead generation. It can work for all types of businesses, and it can work for you, but to achieve a wider reach organically, you need to play by the rules and learn the etiquette of social marketing for business.
How the recent Facebook Updates could impact your business
Facebook conduct user-surveys all the time, and this year they have asked users how they feel about promotional content in their newsfeeds.
The overwhelming response was that they don’t want it. They don’t really want to be marketed to through their newsfeeds. People use social channels because they want to interact with people who are friends or who have a shared interest, but it would appear, they are also happy to interact with brands who interest them. And this is the key. You need to create content that is interesting and relevant to your audience.
In response, Facebook have updated the Promotional Post Rule, and the repercussions of non-compliance could result in reduced reach for your organic posts.
If you want to achieve reach through organic posts on Facebook in the future, you need to understand the recent changes to the Promotional Post Rule and adapt your strategy to ensure Facebook continues to be a viable platform for your business.
Promotional Post Rule Update – July 2017
Since July 2017, Facebook will be more strictly enforcing the Promotional Post Rule. What does this mean?
Content to Avoid:
1. Posts containing a Call to Action that push people to buy a product.
2. Posts that encourage people to enter promotions, giveaways or contests. Keep these to a minimum as continued use of this type of promotion will result in Facebook reducing your audience reach.
3. Posts that re-use the same content from ads.
4. Posts created in a third party app, such as Hootsuite. They want all business page managers to be using Facebook to create and curate content.
5. Outbound links to promotional content that takes the user off the Facebook platform. Minimise links to your website unless it is to a blog or relevant, informative page content.
6. You Tube Videos – Don’t share YouTube videos. Upload video content direct to Facebook or use the Live Video streaming option.
How to improve reach through organic posts
If you play by the book, you will be able to achieve wider reach on the Facebook Platform. Facebook will be increasing their reliance on Relevance Scores for individual posts. We can’t see the scores Facebook is awarding us, but if they feel the content is overly promotional, you will see decreased organic reach.
You will need to aim to achieve more interactions on the content you are posting (comments, likes, shares), which again comes back to creating more relevant content that your audience will want to engage with.
Create and share content that encourages interactions:
Hot News
Motivational
Inspirational
Humorous
At Whizz, we are always keen to help small businesses achieve better results from SEO and online marketing. If you are interested to find out how Whizz can help your business to generate a better return from online marketing, please get in touch on 01252 622129 or visit whizzmarketing.co.uk for information on the full range of SEO and marketing support services we provide.
Telephone No.01252 622129
