What is organic reach and how could it work for my business? If you haven’t asked yourself this question you could be missing out on a world of potential customers.
Why?
Organic reach is the act of using quality content and social media to your liking over time instead of – or as well as – using paid promotional strategies such as paid links and boosted posts for quicker results.
Of course, if you can engage your audience without having to use paid ads, this saves a lot of money.
There is, of course, a catch. You have to find and invest extra time, effort and even talent to be heard by these prospective customers. All without incurring a cost.
What is Organic Reach? Organic vs Paid
Organic reach the number of people who view your content without any paid distribution. You can think about this in terms of the raw number, or in terms of a proportion of your overall audience.
On the other hand, paid reach includes all the efforts to get your message to as many people as possible through paid advertising. This can mean using social media platforms, Google Adwords, or other PPC tools.
Both organic reach and paid reach are closely related. It is recommended that both are used hand in hand with your social media marketing efforts.
What is Organic Reach on Facebook?
Organic reach on Facebook refers to the number of unique users, either fans or nonfans, who see your unpaid for posts in the newsfeed or on your Facebook Page.
It’s widely accepted that it’s more difficult than ever to organically reach your followers on Facebook.
The chances are high you’ve been managing a business page for your Facebook for a couple of years. It’s possible you’ve noted a decline in the way your fans have been viewing and interacting with the posts you publish.
We’ve identified two main reasons for the recent decline in the Facebook organic reach. These are:
- Ad content is now competing with the unpaid content for space in the newsfeed.
- Due to the recent changes in the Facebook News Feed Algorithm, Facebook organic research has begun to shift ranking to ensure newsfeed is increasingly based around connecting with people.
Bring Your Facebook Organic Reach Back to Life
Facebook has been, and is still an essential tool for businesses. However, the changes in the Facebook newsfeed algorithm have seen the platform favour paid advertisers over the marketers looking for organic reach.
There are a few ways to reclaim lost Facebook organic search. Let’s take a look at some e effective organic strategies for Facebook.
Host Live Webinars or Create Static Facebook Videos
Without high-quality, engaging content, you’ll not even earn a single share for your posts.
Facebook video is the new secret of the game.
However, don’t post YouTube links to Facebook. Facebook has a vested interest in promoting its own platform over competitors, so the algorithm privileges video content which is uploaded directly.
Become one of the few companies that are shifting and stand a chance to generate more interactions and build an active community with Facebook Live Videos.
Slow Down on the Number of Times You Post
Postings several times a day and scheduling your blog posts to be shared over and over again won’t cut with the updated Facebook algorithm.
So, to increase your reach, cut the number of times you post and invest that time in curating high-quality content worth your readers’ time.
Be Selective in What You Post
The time has come for marketers and publishers to switch gear from an untargeted content or Facebook posts to targeted selective content.
Regardless of whether you’ve sponsored a post or not, it’s possible to target it to a specific audience. It means the post will reach most of the group who’ll be actually interested in the particular topic leading to improvement interactions and engagement.
Allocate a Budget for Your Best Posts
The secret to reigniting your Facebook organic reach lies in boosting some of your best posts to reach more of your engaged audience. In other words, when a post performs well organically, then you can put money behind it.
But there’s an excellent approach to boosting Facebook posts.
Use the news feed targeting for your organic posts and then analyze the posts that get well received. Once you notice a particular post is likely to take off, then you can swoop in and boost it to increase engagements.
What is Organic Reach on Twitter?
Twitter is an excellent marketing channel and brands are using it to drum up more organic reach. As such, you cannot afford to lag behind.
Just like Facebook, Twitter has changed how they display tweets on your timeline. You already know that the Twitter timeline consists of three segments: ranked tweets, ‘In Case You Missed It’ and the then remaining tweet flow in chronological order.
Now, the algorithm can analyse the tweets from all the accounts followed by a particular user and then assign them a relevance score based on a couple of factors:
Twitter Factors for Organic Reach
The first factor is the tweet itself. How recent is it? Does the tweet contain media such as videos or images? What’s the overall engagement on that tweet?
Once again, as you can see, videos and the level of engagement will determine the number of people your tweet reaches.
Second, how you interact with your fans. If you engage your fans, then they’ll always be the first one to see your tweets.
The third factor is the user. How active a user is on Twitter will determine how they’ll receive your tweet.
The Twitter algorithm is intended to display the best tweet for the users before they can see the time ordered lengthy tweets.
Here are a few hacks to boost your Twitter organic reach:
- Select the top posts, modify and retweet them a couple of times a day and the updated algorithm with reward you with retweets, likes, and impressions,
- Identifying the best time to tweet still works but it’ll change with time. Twitter offers free tools such as Followerwonk and
- Tweriod that you can use to know when most of your followers are active,
- Do more and more Twitter native live videos. You could start by incorporating the videos into text,
- Create branded and relevant hashtags – tied to your brand,
- Find time to reply to most of the mentions for more engagements,
- Set a budget and promote your tweet.
What is Organic Reach on Instagram?
If there’s one big challenge businesses are facing when using Instagram, and especially with the newly updated algorithm, then it’s getting more Instagram followers.
Not receiving as many likes as you did a few years ago? The platform has added a couple of new features aimed at making content easier to share but has rendered organic reach Instagram.
There’s been a paradigm shift towards what the users actually want – the moments they care about rather than just stuffing the news feed with noise. The goal is to make the platform more human while enhancing the fun.
Here are some workarounds to boost your organic reach Instagram without necessarily relying on Instagram paid search:
- Instagram stories to drive engagement and rank higher in the algorithm,
- Take eye-catching photos and videos that tell a story – Instagram is all about sharing your best moments with the followers,
- Post your content when your audience is active and not at 3.00am
- Use Instagram hashtags,
- Use highlights and live stories and integrate hashtags plus your location
- Comment and reply to drive engagement,
- Power likes and super fans are working like crazy. In this case, an account with over 50K followers likes your posts, and the Instagram algorithm interprets that as more meaningful engagements emanating from influential accounts.
How to Maximise Organic Reach on Social Media
There are ways to tackle the decline in organic reach without going down the path of paid content. These are particularly useful for small businesses and startups that may not have the freedom with a budget to apply to their social media marketing.
Some examples of these methods are:
- Unique content on different platforms.
- Tailoring your content to the different platforms you use will be beneficial in how it performs.
- Using image size requirements and text formats expected on the different platforms is essential.
- For example, hashtags work extremely well on platforms like Instagram and Twitter but can look out of place on Facebook, even though they are technically supported.
Consistent Posting
The algorithms on all social media platforms will privilege content from accounts with good engagement. Consistent posting is the only way to build a track record here. Posting consistently is also extremely important for growing your audience.
It can be extremely off-putting for a user to go to a business page that hasn’t been posted in weeks,months or years. This gives the impression of absence. How are they meant to know you still exist?
Consistent posts will convey the message that your business is there to engage with your following and help with any queries they may have.
Understand Your Audience
Understanding the content that your audience enjoys is key when planning your social media strategy. Quality content should be relevant and thought provoking to your social audience no matter the platform.
They are more likely to share it, engage and most importantly, return to your page to consume your content. This will increase your organic reach.
Understand the Algorithm
Social algorithms are constantly changing how they share your content. This is due to the fact that the algorithms are made up of thousands of factors based on how their users behave.
As user behaviour is a constantly changing pattern, having an understanding and a maintenance on how algorithms are changing is crucial for your social strategy and organic reach.
The algorithms themselves also get more sophisticated as time goes on. The larger the data set they have to work with, the better they’re able to predict how users will behave and engage with different content.
However, if you have access to a budget for your social media marketing, there are a number of different promotional options and avenues to choose from to have your content reach your existing and wider audiences.
A growing popular choice for paid reach is the use of social media influencers. These can range from larger influencers such as popular YouTube personalities to micro-bloggers in your local area.
This avenue of paid social marketing looks to increase as Instagram announced it’s new feature to allow brands to pay to boost influencer posts as ads into the feeds of non-followers.
How to Grow Your Business With Organic Reach
Social media organic reach is growing harder by the day. Considering the continuing changes in the various platforms’ algorithms, it only makes sense for marketers like you to change the way you do things.
Although some of the tips we provide here for gaining more organic reach on social platforms will work today, they may not help you three or four months from now.
So it’s important to keep on top of the very latest developments.
Meanwhile, make sure you set a budget for paid reach to enhance your reach further and to avoid relying on non-scalable and unpredictable traffic sources.
To discuss your social media strategy, contact ProfileTree today.
