For the past several years, Facebook has been throttling down the organic reach of content posted to brands' owned pages. According to a survey of more than 100 brand pages, reach has been consistently on the decline since 2012. This trend has been even more drastic since October of 2013, as seen in the graph below:
What You Can Do:
More and more, you'll want to drive reach by creating engaging content that users want to interact with and share on their pages. While organic reach of content posted on owned brand pages is down, branded content that users themselves share is unaffected. This necessitates a switch from the "always on" approach that you're probably using now, posting content continually regardless of if it's going to be a huge hit or a dud with your users. Going forward, Facebook strategy should favor resonance with your fans over frequency and should ideally align with the following strategies:
Know who your "true" fans are
Do312 has 22,191 Facebook page likes, but only 1,607 people actively engaged. The trick to boost reach is to keep tabs on who is repeatedly liking, sharing, commenting, and otherwise interacting with your contact. The more fans that you can encourage to engage with your content means the more organic reach you'll receive, which means even more people engaging, and so on and so forth. This is also a good reason to check in with your Tastemakers/All Stars/Influencers and make sure they're doing their part to help share your content via their social media presence.
Encourage people to become active fans of your content
A combination of diligent responding and leveraging your other media channels will go a long way towards turning people into true fans. If users that comment on your posts or message you on Facebook receive timely, helpful, and appropriately funny feedback from you, they'll be more likely to engage in the future. Applying this same strategy to people that tweet, email, comment on blog posts, etc. will help your user base become active proponents of your metro's brand, rather than just users that occasionally see a Facebook post or tweet.
Reaching new advocates
Reaching new advocates
Provided you've done a good job of identifying your site's existing advocates and reaching out to them across all channels, there's still the problem of trying to reach the people that aren't already fans or actively engaged. Now might be the time to experiment with using a few targeted paid posts to increase the reach of posts to users that would be interested in your content, but aren't already likely to see it on their own accord. This could be especially useful if you have a partner that has content that might not get a ton of engagement without paid support. You could build this into a proposal if it's important to a partner so as not to incur additional costs for impressions that used to be free.
For the time being, if you're still getting decent reach on your posts, it probably makes sense to keep posting content as frequently as possible that has a chance of resonating with your users. But if you notice organic reach trending down, now might be a good time to start adjusting course to maximize engagement. Meanwhile, we'll continue to keep tabs on this trend and advise with best practices that we collect from the various metros.
If you have any questions about the ramifications of this development, or you just want to send over your comments and thoughts, feel free to drop us a note at support@dostuffmedia.com.
