As a Facebook Page owner, you’re always on the lookout for different ways to increase your reach without dipping into your wallet. Yes, Facebook provides some great tools like Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts– but using these tools regularly can cost thousands of dollars per year. For most businesses, this cost simply isn’t feasible. For that reason, here are 4 tips to increase reach that are free and generally under-utilized by Pages.
Facebook Interest Lists – When Interest Lists were announced back in March, marketers celebrated the addition of this feature as another way to reach their fans– as well as potential fans. Ironically, most marketers haven’t figured out how to properly market this feature to their fan base. I suppose Facebook can take on some of this blame, as they’ve done a poor job informing users about how and why to use lists.
With that said, the few who are having success with marketing Interest Lists are having tremendous success– and for good reason– their lists provide extraordinary value. One list that stands out to me is Mari Smith‘s Facebook Marketing Experts and Resources List (pictured below, with over 28,000 subscribers). She ensures that all the pages and people she adds to the list are adding value to the topic– or she removes them. The quality of the content keeps me (and many others) coming back to the list daily– increasing the reach of the pages featured who may not otherwise get into a user’s Newsfeed.
Tip #1: Create a Facebook List centered on a relevant topic that includes key value-adding people and Pages. Use the networks of the people and pages included to fuel initial growth of the list.
Mari Smith’s Facebook Marketing Experts List
Page Notifications – Facebook recently started rolling out a brand-new feature for Pages– notifications. This feature has existed on user profiles for quite a while, but is just now making its debut for Pages. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it’s quite simple. Users can opt-in to receive notifications whenever your page makes a post– like they receive notifications when a friend comments on their status or invites them to an event.
Page Notifications – From AllFacebook.com
Tip #2: Encourage your fans to subscribe to notifications to your page. While your most loyal fans will be thrilled to do so, others may be turned off by this idea– so remember not to be too pushy!
Text-Only Posts – Over the last few weeks, lots of reputable Facebook marketers have mentioned their text-only posts were reaching* significantly more fans than other types of posts (links, photos, etc). I dug deep into some Facebook insights last week and saw that they were right– you can read more on that here. While digging through the data, I noticed that most pages were posting significantly more photos and links than text-only posts– and that’s if they were even posting them at all! The low number of text-only posts may be a reason why they’re performing so well (just a thought– only Facebook knows the real reason!).
*It’s important to note that this improvement is in reach, not necessarily engagement. Some people have reported having similar total engagement, despite the higher reach. For example, check out Jon Loomer’s posting experiment here.
Tip #3: Try including more text-only posts in your Facebook Marketing mix. Take advantage of the current situation by posting engaging questions to garner fan feedback or fill-in-the-blanks for some good ole’ fun.
Time + Space Out Your Posts - One of the most bizarre things I hear from Facebook Page owners is that they have no method to timing their posts. Most people I speak with have a ‘shotgun approach’, picking random times and hoping for the best. Some will then repeat a time if it does well, while others don’t even track performance (or look at it in Facebook Insights). While Insights doesn’t explicitly tell you what times [on what days] are performing best for your page, a simple spreadsheet (like one pictured below) will do the trick. In addition, Pages don’t realize that they cannibalize their previous posts if they post too much during a short period of time.
Sample Spreadsheet (Note- not real insights data)
Tip #4: Track your performance per time slot in a spreadsheet to see what times perform best on which days. Also, be sure to leave at least a few hours between posts to avoid cannibalizing the reach of previous posts.
Does Tip #4 seem like a lot of work? Well, it is– but we can do some of the hard work for you. PostRocket automatically schedules your posts for the best time for your fans (and keeps proper spacing between them!) to optimize for maximum fan reach. Learn how and sign up for free!
PostRocket’s Optimized Post Timing
Related Post – 7 Easy Ways to Increase Your Page’s EdgeRank
Related Post – 17 Survival Tips for Facebook Marketing
Stay in touch, follow me on Twitter @itsmikemags and let me know what you thought about this post!
Mike
