Have you ever wondered why your Facebook posts have less reach than a few years ago? Why do your posts reach less than 10% of your fans? The answer has its own name and is called, EdgeRank, the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what content to show each user based on their affinities and behaviors. Below, we give you 10 tips to defeat the dreaded algorithm and increase your visibility on this social network.
EdgeRank Evolution
The Facebook algorithm, since its appearance, has been undergoing numerous modifications to try to improve the user experience and be able to offer them content tailored to their interests.
The first big change came in 2009 when it left behind the traditional chronological order to prioritize the most popular posts, considering them more attractive to the audience. And, from that moment, Facebook was perfecting its algorithm year after year and introducing important changes that notably affected the organic reach of brands.
But it was at the beginning of 2018 when this transformation process reached its peak. Mark Zuckerberg explained in his official Facebook account the changes that were going to be applied in this social network to ensure that “the time we spend on Facebook is time well spent”.
“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness. “
Mark Zuckerberg
All this process of change in the algorithm has had a clear consequence: the posts of family and friends have risen to the top of the news feed, while the organic reach of the company pages has been significantly reduced.
Also Read: 20 Ways To Attract New Users To Your Facebook Page
How to beat EdgeRank?
When preparing our posts for Facebook, it is vital to know what aspects EdgeRank takes into account to decide to show some content and banish others. These are the aspects that cannot be missed.
1. Optimize your profile 📝
Having your profile is the first aspect that you must take care of if you want Facebook to consider you a reliable brand and show your content to a greater number of people. Your fan page cannot miss:
- Profile picture
- Cover image
- Description as complete as possible in the information section.
Facebook is suspicious of incomplete profiles and, if your page lacks aspects as important as those indicated, do not expect to have large reach figures. So if you’re still missing a point from this checklist, run to complete it!
2. Banish the clickbait 👆
In 2014 Facebook announced its intention to fight against clickbait and began to severely penalize those posts that, through striking and sensational headlines, seek easy click.
These posts are detectable because they have high CTR numbers, but also very high bounce rates. In other words, many people ‘click’ and click on the link, but most leave the page quickly because they cannot find what the post promised.
Although this social network generates a lot of traffic to our web pages, we should not try to get it through the clickbait, but always betting on quality content. And so we will achieve: not only that Facebook does not penalize us, but we will also retain our audience.
3. Encourage the long comment and mentioning 💬
Facebook is increasingly demanding and is no longer satisfied with our content generating simple comments from isolated users, but wants our posts to be capable of generating conversations.
A good option to get our users to dialogue in our posts is to ask them to tell us any anecdote and tag the people they lived with. In a high percentage the tagged person will respond to that comment and, voilà ! we have satisfied their wishes.
4. Post regularly 📰
Facebook is like that friend who gets angry if you go a long time without showing signs of life, and he will not easily forgive you for leaving him for a long season.
But, like everything, in balance is a virtue! Publishing regularly does not mean that you need to publish every 5 minutes, because the only thing we will achieve is saturating our audience.
Our advice? Prepare a monthly calendar with the contents you want to launch that month and distribute them regularly so that you publish about 3 or 4 posts a week.
5. Choose a good schedule ⏰
In Facebook’s own insights, in the ‘posts’ section, you will find a graph that indicates the days and hours at which your audience is connected.
It is better to schedule your content a couple of hours before the maximum audience peak, so you will give your post time to gain relevance, while dragging viewers from other time slots.
In this example, the optimal time to post would be approximately 11:00. Since, although the highest point is 13:00, we see that an hour later the audience drops dramatically, while publishing the post at 11:00, we will be able to reach part of the people who connect from 11:00 to 15:00.
6. Videos directly from Facebook 🎬
Facebook will positively value that you create content within the social network itself. Forget about the Youtube links and upload the video directly to the platform. In addition, in this way, we can perform other complementary functions such as labeling products, adding a location, etc.
This apparently insignificant action will make your reach grow noticeably. We invite you to take the test and tell us the result in the comments!
7. Quality content ★
One of Facebook’s goals is for people to spend more time using this social network, so posts that help you achieve this goal will be rewarded with greater reach. And the best way to achieve this is, without a doubt, quality content.
If we can engage our audience, they will spend more time in front of our posts (they will see more of our videos and perform other engaging actions).
The contents that retain the audience most and also what Facebook values the most (from lowest to highest) are:
- Links
- Photographs
- Videos
- Direct
8. Connect with people 👪
Do not talk about how good your company is or the quality of your products or services. Focus on how you solve your client’s problems, how you help them achieve their goals, this type of content generates excitement in your fans and good results in social networks.
Also Read: How To Turn Your Facebook Page Fans Into Engaged Superfans?
9. Reactions better than likes ❤
For Facebook, it is important that your posts manage to generate ‘likes’ among your fans, but the reactions are on another level!
That your content is capable of generating emotion in the viewer and the viewer considers that a simple like is not enough to express it, it is a key indicator that your content has the quality and is liked by the public, in short, they deserve to be shown.
10. The importance of Facebook Ads 📸
If what you want is to see within your reach take off like a rocket, you should not rule out the option of investing in advertising on Facebook (Facebook Ads). The paid campaigns on this social network are a very good option since they usually have high profitability. You won’t need to spend large amounts of money to see your results increase exponentially.
Put these tips into practice to get started with your Facebook strategy, get more interactions and increase organic reach. If you have any questions, please leave them below in the comments section.
