Marketing experts agree that getting free exposure through your Facebook Page is getting harder and harder.  So what can you do to continue to maximize your reach?  We will focus on 5 features within Facebook I think you should spend the majority of your time.  But before we begin, let’s focus on 3 things I think you should avoid.

3 Practices to Avoid

1. Avoid trying to get traffic to your website from Facebook.  Facebook organic reach has declined steadily since 2014.  The end result is that businesses with Facebook pages have to “pay to play” if they want to direct traffic off of Facebook and onto their website. 

More recently, you might’ve noticed a greater dip in the organic reach of your Facebook content because of an important change to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm.

In January 2018, according to Facebook’s Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri, Facebook began to “shift ranking to make News Feed more about connecting with people and less about consuming media in isolation.”

–The Decline of Organic Facebook Reach & How to Adjust to the Algorithm, from the Hubspot Blog

Other references:

https://www.bibblio.org/blog/decline-facebook-referral-traffic-time-become-bullish-seo

2. Avoid Boosting Posts.  Boosting posts is a poor use of marketing spend.  Results for boosting a post are measured in post views, rather than a user taking a specific outcome.  Your funds would be better served doing Google PPC or Facebook Ads.  Your business has to be structured in a specific way to take advantage of either of these options.

“The short answer to this question is no – provided you have the ability to run Facebook ads from within the Facebook Ad Manager platform instead. Facebook Boost Posts have a specific objective and do not align with business outcomes. There are other far more effective Facebook ads to run than a Boost post.”

– Are Facebook Boost Posts Worth It, 39 Degrees Marketing

https://www.vendasta.com/blog/facebook-sponsored-posts-boosting-vs-ads

3. Avoid Using Social Media Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite.  There is some disagreement on the matter, but I’m pretty confident that using these tools decreases engagement.

3 Strategies to Think About

Think About Where Facebook is Weak

When it comes to getting the most out of Facebook, it pays to think about the areas where Facebook is trying to improve as a platform.  Are they rolling out a new feature?  Trying to increase their market share?  Usually social media platforms will prioritize new areas they are trying to break into.

Repurpose Old Content

Did we publish a good video to Youtube, our website?  Is there an awesome resource in the visitor center we could take a picture of?  Some of these assets can be reproduced on Historic Sumpter’s Facebook page.  You can even take content that has already been written on the website, trifolds, and the like, and republish it straight to Facebook.

Know What Types of Engagement Drive Results

Shares, Comments, and Page Likes are much more important than post likes.  Knowing this, how can you craft your posts to encourage more shares and comments? For example, you could ask for people to comment within the post, have a giveaway for the first 5 people to share a post, etc.

5 Facebook Features You Should Use

1. Always use an image in a standard post. Engagement is quite a bit higher when you include an image.

2.  Look at Your Analytics.  See which posts performed the best and which site actions people are the most comfortable taking.  Then double down on those strategies.

3.  Upload Video Directly to Facebook.  Video typically has the highest engagement rates of any type of content on Facebook.  source: We Are Social

4.  Go Live.  Live video can have excellent engagement for the amount of work it takes.  Source: Agora Pulse

5. Create Events.  People in Eastern Oregon are often alerted via the Facebook app of events happening in their area.  The other great part about this feature is that our area is small enough that the total number of events that you’ll be competing with is comparatively small.