Facebook Organic Reach still Achievable

If my memory serves me correctly, in roughly the spring of 2014 Facebook changed their algorithm. Well, they change their algorithm it seems like once a quarter, so last spring is what I am going with. As we have all witnessed and read, Facebook’s algorithm chnaged drastically that only 1 – 2% of your brand’s likes will see your posts. In this Blog post, I am going to discuss on the Facebook Organic Reach is still attainable and how one of my brand’s posts did it.

I believe that if you build the right Facebook audience you can achieve more than the 2% organic reach. The right audience is key. Remember, what works for me may not work for you and your brand. Facebook has good analytics, so be sure to utilize those and they will help you with feature postings. On our page we currently have 29,700 likes, which isn’t a whole lot when compared to the bigger brands. Each day, I try to reach 2,000+ people organically with our posts. If my math is correct, that is about 8% of our total likes. Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.

bulldogsI started out the first week of December with this post about a Lake County restaurant being featured as 1 of the 17 best burgers in Enjoy Illinois by Thrillist. I knew going in, that these types of posts typically do well. I was expecting this post to organically reach anywhere between 5 – 6k people. I did not expect it to hit 13,400 organically, with 148 likes, 10 comments and 113 shares. People like food, they love trying new places to it if the restaurant is highly rated, so overall, this was a solid post from the start. I made sure to tag our local restaurant, the state of Illinois Tourism, Enjoy Illinois and put the link in the status. I also made sure the photo showed up as a link as well, so people could click on the link in the status or the picture to be taken to the article. People then started tagging other people in the comments.

The next day, I thought I could have a high organic reach day again with a post about Ravinia Festival announcing it’s first performance of next summer of Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. In the past Ravinia posts have a done ok, nothing to write home about. The post did not do as well as I thought it would have.

holidaytrainThen came Wednesday. From my website Google Analytics and my Social Media stats I know that Wednesday starts the include of people looking at our site and researching things to do for the upcoming weekend. That upcoming weekend, there was the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train coming through the area. I was excited about it personally because my 2 1/2 year old son is into trains and we had went the previous year. With this event being on a Sunday, I knew it would attract a good crowd. So I found an engaging picture of the holiday train and a made a post that tagged the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train page, the Gurnee Park District page where the train would be arriving and put a link in the status to the event description on our website. What then happened, was something that I never imaged would happen for me. 212 likes, 36 comments, 347 shares and 23,912 people reached organically. The posts reach kept growing each day through Sunday. People where tagging people in the comments and the shares continued to rise. I had hit a sweet spot with this post with my Facebook audience.

The next step now is to look at the analytics, see why this post did so well, figure out what my audience wants and try to recreate it. I am a digital marketer for a family tourism destination, so my audience wants unique family events. Things that you can not do every day and something the entire family can enjoy.

What I have realized is that this type of reach is achievable no matter the size of you Facebook page, as long as you have the right audience. Also, lucky for me, I do have some Social Media Ambassadors who do consistently like and share my posts, so that did with this specific one. By giving your audience the right content that they are looking for and properly timing the information, a post can successfully reach a large amount of people organically.

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