10 actions to increase your Facebook audience

Increasing your reach, your list, your audience is what we all need to ultimately increase sales. Here’s 10 actions that you can take today to get started building your Facebook reach.

About Facebook

Facebook is a medium to share news and projects to the 1 billion daily active users, and over 70million Facebook business pages. That’s a lot of people and a lot of businesses. One heck of an audience.

If we, as a user have ‘liked’ say 50 business pages there could be 50 or more new posts to show up on your newsfeed every day, so Facebook created algorithms to filter all those posts and only show you only what they deem to be more valuable to you. This means that you, as a user, will not have a clogged up timeline of posts from all those business pages. It’s really very clever!

But not so good for a business page who wants their posts to show up.

Of course you can pay Facebook by boosting your post to reach more of your likers, but there are some other tricks you can adopt that will ensure your posts are being reached by your likers, organically.

One thing we can be sure of is that without working at it, your posts will not be shown to all of your ‘likers’.

 

How do the algorithms work?

Nobody knows exactly! There are over 100,000 factors are taken into consideration, which no doubt will be considerably scientific, but it is basically how much interest the end user shows in your page. This is indicated by the number of likes, comments, shares and saves your posts get. The more engagement your page gets over time will result in more of your future posts being released to your ‘likers’ newsfeeds.

 

So how can you increase your reach?

Increasing your reach is all about pleasing your audience so when you take to your Facebook stage, armed with this new bag of tricks, you’ll keep your audience engaged and engaging…

 

TIP 1. Embrace your audience

The first thing to do is slightly adjust the way you view your “likers”. We all want more likes, of course we do but these likes make up your audience. Think of them as just that, and you’ll automatically appreciate and value them more than ‘likers’.

 

TIP 2. What floats their boat?

The types of posts that receive more engagement will be released more. So if videos or photos are liked and shared more, then more of your video and photo posts will be released in the future. What do your followers like? More videos, links, photos, forums, articles, tips? What floats their boat? Give it to them.

 

TIP 3. Enable Facebook’s Audience settings

Preferred page audience: A basic form of optimisation but worthwhile to do. Go to your business Facebook page’s settings and select Preferred page audience – this will enable you to set general audience preferences. Once set you can forget about it, unless of course your business takes a new direction…

 

Audience optimisation setting: If you have over 5,000 likes you will already have this enabled in the window when you create a new post (if this is you skip this next step), however if you haven’t yet reached the dizzy height of 5k, you may not even know this exists so go to your Facebook business page: settings/general/audience optimization. Open up the ability to select a preferred audience – click the ✓ box and save changes.

 

This means that from now on when you compose a post, a new option will be available on the bottom of the status box. Giving you the ability to specify your audience will help the algorithms find your ideal audience. You can also restrict audiences should you want to:

 

 

TIP 4. Give your audience a reason to ‘SEE FIRST’

As Facebook users (personal profile) we have the option to tell Facebook that we want to see all the posts of a specific page. It’s easy, you simply like a page, then hover over the like button and click to see all. Users who do this will see ALL of your posts:

 

So how do we convince our Facebook audience to elect to see all our posts?

You could go ahead and ask them to! But are they realistically going to do that? Do you have a good relationship with them? If you give them a reason to, then they might well do. Think about what will push your audiences buttons? How about posting a one day competition where they must answer a question each day to be in with a chance to enter? Could you feature them in some way? Give them a great reason not to miss out on your posts. Your fantastic content could be all you need…

 

TIP 5. Content is King

Always keep this in mind. Quite simply; provide value for your audience. Think like your audience and create what you would want to read if you were them. What information and offers float their boats?

 

TIP 6. Host your Videos on Facebook

To post a video to Facebook, most people will post a link to a youtube video. This video is hosted by youtube therefore sends people away from Facebook. Facebook would like to keep users on site so your post linking to an external site may not be visible to much of your audience. But if you upload a video rather than link to it, so that it is hosted on Facebook, you won’t be sending users anywhere else and your video will reach more of your audience.

Simply when composing your post, go to photo/video, add and upload it here, add your video tags and hit publish. And, you have lots of options when uploading videos, carousels, slideshows in facebook and more.

TIP 7. How often to post

Some basic research will give you an idea of the ideal number of daily posts for your business audience. One may not reach many, but hitting 10-20 daily posts could turn people off. Test your posting and engagement to see how many likes, comments and shares you get – start from 1 post a day, then work up to 6-7. After 2 weeks you should have a good idea of what works for you.

 

TIP 5. Best time to post

Depending on your business niche, there will be better times to post.

Start testing, week days, week ends, mornings, evenings to work out what works better for you. Then schedule your posts accordingly. A benefit of doing this is that you will have to post daily for 2 weeks in the name of research.

 

TIP 6. Hashtags

Research shows that the less hashtags a post has, the more engagement it will get. So keep your #hashtags under control #lessismore #keepitsimple

 

TIP 7. Share your own business page posts

• On your personal profile – Let’s say you have 1000 friends, straight away you’re sharing your business page with those 1000 people. Even though they don’t actually ‘like’ your business page they’ll still see it.
• In relevant groups – share your worthwhile content but remember spamming brings no value to your reputation.
• From other business pages you manage – it’s great for engagement!

 

TIP 9. Create your Social Tribe

Create your own network with similar, but not competitive businesses. Simply like, comment and hopefully share each others posts. On MumsClub we call it building your social tribe:

Beginner Level: Create a social tribe group where you post links to your main promotional posts, and everyone who joins your tribe likes and comments, and you do likewise when they post.

Be a Pro: Set Facebook to see your tribe member’s posts at the top of your feed (as in tip 4 above). If you have say 20 people in your social tribe, make it a habit to at least like them all daily but comment on at least the top 5. If all 20 people do this, you’ll help build all your social audiences. Commenting on 20 posts a day will be time consuming- so be realistic on your promises!

You can like and post as you and your Facebook page – that immediately turns that 20 members to 40.

Additionally posting as your business page increases your reach – your name and hyperlink will be shown on all those business pages who have a whole new audience for you to tap in to.