First things first.
Fan page reach does NOT equal overall Facebook reach. If it did, we’d all be screwed.
You have heard the news by now. Facebook organic reach for fan and business pages is down. For many it is practically down to nothing. On average only one percent of all your fans will even see your posts. That’s pretty dismal. Even for a page with 1,000 fans, that’s only 10 people. For a page with 10,000 fans, that’s still only 100 people. Blah. Blah. Blah. Right?
Don’t worry, I’ve got good news for you. To think of your fan page as the only reach you get is flawed in a big way. Social media is about the collective number. It’s about sharing. Your story is told by what you share and what others share about you. Your reach extends way beyond what you share and what you share only. It’s the sum of every single person sharing content about you and more importantly from your website.
Facebook Traffic vs Facebook Reach
I’m not going to lie to you. Some of our fan pages have great engagement, others don’t. For ConvertWithContent, we get most of our social engagement on LinkedIn. It makes sense too. LinkedIn is for businesses. We sell to businesses. Simple. Our Facebook fan page on the other hand gets low engagement. With 800 followers (all real, we’ve never advertised), on average we reach around 30-40 people with each post. Which means we get a few clicks and a few likes every time we post. Nothing to write home about. But when I look at our Google analytics, I see a completely different story.
From February 14th through March 17th, I pulled some numbers.
We reached 622 people organically through posting around 3-4 times per week on Facebook.
During that same time period we received 221 hits.
But if you dig deeper it shows something even more interesting. It shows that the majority of this traffic is coming from links that we didn’t share on our Facebook page in the last month.
What does this mean?
Other people are sharing our content and while we have lower reach on our Fan Page, our reach extends a lot further through regular people sharing the content on their business pages and personal pages.
Bottom Line
More Content = More Sharing = More Reach
or
Content + Sharing = Reach
If you want to reach more people on Facebook, you need to have a lot of content for them to share. You need to blog on a regular basis so that you have more things floating around bringing people back to your site.
If you look at the past year, you’ll see a lot more traffic. Again if you break it down, you’ll see that there are 358 shared URLs out there bringing us traffic. We have over 300 blog posts on our site, so it is safe that each blog post is doing it’s job to bring us traffic.
The more content we produce, the more referral traffic we’ll continue to get. Each new blog post is a new way for someone to come and join us. But not because we’re sharing it on our fan page, but because other people are sharing it too.
It’s the collective and it’s powerful. Facebook reach is good if you know what to look at.
So, how can you increase overall Facebook reach right away?
5 Realistic Ways To Increase Overall Facebook Reach Today
1. Spend Some Money On Facebook Ads
The fastest way to increase your reach is to engage in a little ad campaign. I’d only focus on advertising to your fans and custom audiences. I’d also boost posts and drive people to a landing page to sign up. Don’t advertise for fans. I just don’t think it is a good investment.
2. Blog On A Regular Basis
You knew I was going here, didn’t you? The best way to increase your Facebook reach and increase your Facebook traffic is by having a ton of blog posts for others to share. You’ve seen the data above. It works.
3. Add Social Share Buttons To Your Website
If you want people to do something, you need to make it super easy for them to do it. Make sure all of your pages have the share buttons on them. I think the most important share buttons are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ and Pinterest. But if you find you are getting traffic from other social sources, you should add those buttons too.
4. Engage In A Little Outreach
Sometimes all it takes is a little asking to get the job done. What’s the worst that people can say? No. Reach out to fan page owners, your fans, your friends, and your customers. A little newsletter action can help too.
5. Share More On Your Fan Page
Reach adds up. If you post one time a day, you’ll reach x amount of people. If you share two times per day, you’ll reach x + y. x+y is usually more than x. 🙂 Unless y is 0 of course.
What do you think? Are you confident that you can increase your fan page reach?
