As I mentioned last week, one of our projects for this year was maintaining a tourism destination Facebook page called Visit the Gyp Hills. When we started the project back in April, the page already existed and had 266 likes. Over the course of eight months, we increased the number of likes on that page by 122%. We went from 266 page likes to 592 page likes, and we did it all through organic (unpaid) posts. Our main objective for this page was brand awareness. We wanted to make people aware of what a hidden treasure the Gyp Hills of south-central Kansas is, and convince them to go and visit. The following are a few more tips that we observed for increasing your organic reach with your Facebook posts.

5 More Tips for Increasing Your Organic Facebook Reach

• Be consistent with your posting schedule. One of the biggest debates for posting on Facebook is how frequently you should be doing it. Some experts say to post as often as several times a day, while others say posting one to two times per week is ideal. There are even “studies” out there that support both of these theories. We've found that it’s best to simply pick a posting schedule and stick to it. It’s important to show your followers that you're there for them, and that you’re interested and excited about what's happening in your business or community. For our project, we committed to posting between one to two times per week and found that to be a manageable schedule for our team.
• Think quality over quantity. It’s better to put out fewer posts with more thoughtful content that will benefit your audience than to put out a lot of posts that get little-to-no engagement. It takes a little longer to create a quality post that your audience will find useful, but remember your objectives for using social media as a business or community organization. You want to
  • Generate awareness for your brand
  • Build a community of like-minded followers, and
  • Provide value to your customers and clients.

On average, we spent anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour creating each post for our project.

• Post highly engaging content for several weeks ahead of a big promotion.Posting highly engaging content over the course of a few weeks will train Facebook’s algorithm to share your posts with more people. Facebook will remember that your posts typically get a lot of engagement and show your promotion to more people without your having to boost it or pay for an ad.
• If you do share content from another source on your business page, it’s better to share your own website content than someone else’s.For example, we were sent a poem written by a local blogger about the Gyp Hills area. Instead of simply sharing a link to his blog post on his website, we asked for his permission to write our own blog post and feature his poem on our website. Then, when we posted about it on Facebook, we shared the link back to the blog post on our website. The reach and engagement on this type of post wasn’t great because Facebook doesn’t like to encourage people to leave Facebook, but you’re still better off driving traffic back to your own website than to someone else’s.
• Check out one of our most engaging organic posts promoting a retail location.In this post, we relied heavily on the store owner’s great photos. We used a photo of the outside of the building, which is beautiful. Then we used photos that showed off her product displays. Remember as you set up your store for display, arrange your items in ways that will look beautiful both in person and in photos. Take photos of your store during the different seasons of the year so that you always have fresh content to share. In your post copy, share something unique about your store or talk about what you love about the different products that you carry.

Stay Tuned…

In the next installment of Brown Bag Marketing Bits, I’ll discuss what not to do when posting on Facebook to increase organic reach and engagement. I’ll also share my insights about a few of our posts that didn't get a high amount of reach or engagement and why.

You can...do it!
Elizabeth Collins

In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.

Warren Bennis