Improving FB Organic Reach for SMM

 Hello Friends, Welcome to LearnVern.

In the last topic we learnt what Moment Marketing is.

In this unit we will see how you can increase the organic reach of your facebook page.

We will also see the possible reasons for the decline of Facebook's organic reach and how you can improve it.

So first of all we will need to understand that after we post a content on a facebook page, why is the Facebook reach declining.

Earlier your content reached over 100 or even 500 people, whereas now it is only reaching 50 odd people. There could be multiple reasons behind this.

The very first reason is that content on Facebook is increasing day by day.

As the number of users on Facebook have increased, they have started creating more content and hence a variety of content is made available on Facebook for the users.

So people are creating a lot of content and people are consuming a lot of content.

So the very first reason for the decline in Facebook reach is that the content on Facebook has increased exponentially.

The second important reason is the news feed. When you login to your account, the feed that is visible is called the “News Feed”. And these days, the ‘news feed’ has become a lot more personalised.

Let me explain this to you with the help of an example.

If you have been active on Facebook for years, and you have around 1000 or 1500 friends.

Now tell me something:

Are you able to see the updates of all your 1500 friends on your “news feed”?

Maybe not.

You are hardly able to see the updates of 5 or 10 or 15 friends on your facebook account.

What is the reason behind this?

Facebook understands you and hence intends to show only the relevant content that might interest you.

So if you have interest in the updates of only 25 friends of yours, then Facebook will show you the updates of only those 25. And it will not display those content to you that isnt of your interest or you do not wish to engage with.

So Facebook is moving towards personalisation. Hence it pushes only those brands, pages or profile content on your news feed that you wish to engage with.

Lastly, content is being prioritised based on your individual actions. For example if you hit “Like”, or “Love” or “HaHa” or you posted an emoji or some comment or you shared something - so Facebook tracks all these consistent actions.

Right?

Facebook is tracking and hence the results that Facebook throws on your feed will be a lot more personalised. So you only will get to see such updates of your friends, or of the brand pages that you might want to interact with or some content that you may want to check out.

So according to me, these are all the different reasons because of which the Organic reach of Facebook is declining.

One is “organic reach” where you don't need to invest money and the other is “Paid” or “Sponsor” where you spend to boost and aim for better visibility.

Here we are only talking of Organic reach. If you have 5000 friends in your Facebook account, then why is your organic reach declining. And all the above reasons that we discussed, according to me, are the prime reasons for the decline in organic reach.

Now, let us look at how we can increase organic reach.

What are those tips that can help in increasing the reach?

The first tip is to engage with your audience.

Right?

We learnt about a strategy in one of our previous units and that was

“Educate”,

“Engage” and

“Promote”

So out of these 3, the third option ”Promote” does not only mean that we are creating promotional related content.

One thing we all need to understand here is that users ARE NOT visiting facebook to buy your product.

They visit to know more about their friends, families or relatives, what are they doing, what is happening in their lives, what is new, what are the new social updates, etc etc

At times you can see brands on their news feed too.

But if you only post content related to Promote, then you may not get the desired reach because the users do not enjoy, they do not appreciate heavy content related to sales. Hence they won't engage with your content.

And if they don't engage with your content, Facebook the next time won't display that news feed as it has understood your behaviour, your interest and thus will not generate additional reach on your post.

Thus it is imperative to create the content that users are able to engage with, the content that generates a lot of feedback. In such cases, Facebook will help us in generating additional reach.

The second important tip is “Mix up your post formats”

It should not be the case that you are posting only text related content, or only image related content.

Try to mix the post formats - at times post a video, at times just a post, at times stories.

So you have to keep experimenting by mixing the post formats as only then will you be able to figure out which post is generating you the maximum reach and maximum engagement.

The third important tip is “Use relevant and appropriate hashtags”.

Make use of trending hashtags which will ensure additional visibility on your post and thus your post will appear in a lot of search.

Hashtags will categorise your post

As soon as your post starts getting categorised, your post will start fetching more visibility.

Thus the entire Instagram universe or the Facebook universe will make use of your hashtag to search for your post and land on that page.

And the last tip is “Dig into analytics”

Analytics is an awesome tool or feature of social media.

You get to know all the details.

how many males viewed your post

How many females viewed your post

The age group of your audience

Which city do they belong to

All these data, all these analytics are available on your social media. We will learn more about it in our upcoming sessions.

But remember, always keep analytics in mind while publishing content and publish  only those content that your users like.

Do not post any such content that your users don't enjoy or like.

The engagement on your post will help you know and understand this.

If there is a lot of engagement on your post, it means that the users are liking your content

And if your post doesn't have any engagement that means your post isn't being liked by the users.

So post such content that your users, your audience likes.

There is one more “pro tip”

Rotate your posting frequency.

Experiment with it.

Social media requires a lot of experimentation.

What will click, what will hit, what will fail - you will know only by experimenting

There is no secret formula or a set formula.

No single formula or idea will work the same for all domains or industries.

No such secret formula exists on social media.

That is why you need to identify what your industry or your audience want and you should rotate content, you should experiment with it.

Similarly, you should also experiment with posting frequency.

Analytics will help you to know when your fans come online, what time of the day, that time you should be posting content. You should keep track of your posting frequency too.

At times publish 3 posts a week, and at times 4 posts a week and even 5 posts a week. Then compare week 1, week 2 and week 3 and check out whether there was any difference in the engagement when 3 posts, 4 posts and 5 posts were published.

Did the engagement go up or did it go down. All of these should be experimented with post frequency and thus these experiments will enable you to move towards a better result.

Post timing - as i discussed, whether you are posting in the morning hours or evening hours or towards the end of the day during the night hours. If you post a little ahead of time before your audience comes online, then there is a high probability that when they come online on facebook or instagram your post appears on their news feed.

Then is “Moment Marketing”, we already learnt about it in our previous unit.

Implement Moment Marketing,

converse on the ongoing trends,

make use of appropriate hashtags.

This will generate additional reach and visibility,

And make use of Analytics, by which you will move a level upwards.

Now let us understand the best practices.

As you can see from my slide, I have taken an example of an international brand “BlendJet”.

The blue tick means that it is a verified account.

BlendJet has managed its page very well.

They have a very attractive and creative cover image too.

They have displayed their logo in a good way.

So the most important thing is that you should define your focus and strategy well.

Why are you on social media?

What is your objective?

What do you wish to do?

Like the objective of BlendJet is very clear, they want more sales and hence in the “call to action” button they have mentioned ”View Shop”

Thus it means that if a user has visited their page, then at least for once the users must visit their shop. And as soon as you visit their shop, they would encourage you to check out their product’s testimonials, their customer reviews, their products demos, by which the users will be encouraged to buy the product once, or try the product once.

And once you try their product, they will also try to sell their accessories.

Thus, you should be very clear on :

the purpose of being on social media,

the KPI - “Key Performance Indicators”

And how do you wish to move ahead on social media?

Hence your strategy should be very clear and well defined.

The second important point is your “target audience”.

Who is your target audience?

Are they females??

Are they males??

Are they teenagers??

Are they senior citizens??

You must have a clear understanding of your target audience.

You should know the persona of your target audience, what do they do, what are their media habits.

Whether they listen to music or not.

Do they watch “JioCinema” or do they watch “HotStar”.

Track their media habits, like do they watch “Netflix” or do they listen to the music on “Gaana.com” or “JioSaavn”.

What do they do, what are their media consumption habits?

This will help you in devising a better advertising plan.

If they are highly active on Youtube, then you can target them on Youtube.

If they are active on Instagram, then you can target them there

But you will have to create or define an audience persona, or a buyer’s profile using which you will be able to create a better advertising plan.

Lastly, you should know and understand your product and business category.

Who all are the competitors in that product category, what are they doing differently.

In our 5th module, I will discuss a very powerful tool of Competitive Analysis. With just a few clicks, you will be able to get the details of how many people, for that industry, are running ads on Facebook and which are those ads. So this powerful and helpful tool, we shall cover in our upcoming unit. And with the help of that tool, we can review the entire competitive landscape with just a few clicks.

I will advise you to check this Facebook page. I have pasted the link for the same at the bottom of the screen. Using this link you will be able to view their facebook page.

Then let us talk about the page of an Indian brand - “Biotique. They manufacture ayurvedic cosmetic and personal care products.

So the most important thing is to complete and fill in the entire information of the page, products listed on the website, url of the website, the email address, contact details - all these things should be filled in.

Try to be creative.

Add some creative elements to your cover image

You may add video too, or a group of images that you can swipe right. Cover image also supports “Carousel”.

So add some creativity to your facebook page or to your instagram account.

“Have a call to action as per business objective”

Whatever is your business objective, your call to action should reflect that objective.

We learnt from our previous example of 'BlendJet’ that their call to action was “View Shop”.

In this example as well you will see a similar “call to action” and that is “Shop on Website”

Biotique as a brand also wishes that their users should visit their ecommerce platform at least once to check out their products as they want maximum products to be checked out from their ecommerce platform. Thus their call to action is clearly mentioned as “Shop” and reflects their objective too.

One thing that is growing rapidly is the “ASK”option.

On my screen if you see, when you click on any “ASK” button then automatically the chat of messenger will open up and you can post questions using “messenger bot”

The messenger bot will share the automated replies and this will help you in your decision.

If you are managing a brand page where you get a lot of queries then you can make use of messenger bot, it is very simple to configure it. You can configure it with the help of a step by step tutorial. The frequently asked questions that customers usually ask can also be fed into that bot and thus you need not reply to them manually. Some parts of it can be automated and this will save a lot of time which can be used in other creative work.

Messenger bot automation is growing very fast these days, many brands are adopting it. Many queries of the users are getting solved easily with the help of it.

I have pasted the link of Biotique on my screen, so do visit and check out its facebook page.

Check out their posts to see whether their posts fit into our “Educate”, “Engage” strategies.

How are they implementing “Moment Marketing”

Try to observe all these while visiting their page.

Now we will look at “Content Calendar”

What is a Content Calendar?

If you need to plan the content for the entire week, for example

Which post will be published on Monday?

What will be posted on Tuesday or on Wednesday?

How many posts will be published in a week?

Will it be an image or a video?

All of these can be managed with the help of a tool named “Content Calendar”

This will organise your post.

You will know what is going to be published on Twitter, on Facebook and when.

You can plot this format on an excel sheet too and you can create a “content calendar” for yourself.

Content Calendar will organise and manage your social media posts, thus the entire social media management process will become simpler. This will ease your work and speed your work too.

So “Content Calendar” is definitely “A MUST” check out tool. There are a lot of platforms that offer you to download this for Free.

You can check out the content calendar of “HubSpot”, their format is very engaging. You have many such free resources from where you can download your content calendar for Free.

That is all for today. If you have any queries or comments then click the discussion button below the video and post there. This way you will  be able to connect to fellow learners and discuss the course. Also our team will try to solve your queries.

In the next topic we will see what Facebook ads are, how do they work, how many types of facebook ads exist. The next unit will be an introduction to the Facebook Ads.

See you in the next session. Good Bye!