What Determines Organic Reach on Facebook?
If you have a business page associated with your travel business, you are well aware how hard it is to get your content shown, even to the people who like and follow your page.
Facebook is becoming more of a "pay to play" platform, and the organic reach we used to see with our posts continues to drop. However, it hasn't disappeared completely. This means that there are still things we can do to ensure that our posts does get out into the newsfeed in some capacity.
To capitalize on this, it is important that we understand what determines organic reach on Facebook. First things first, though. Let me start by explaining what organic reach is to ensure we all are talking the same language.
Organic Reach: A post being seen by a user without you having to pay to promote it.
I do not consider myself an expert in all things Facebook, and Facebook’s algorithm is complex to say the least, but there are a few factors that contribute to organic reach.
Let's take a look at these five contributing factors to make sure we are doing everything possible to have our content reach as far as possible.
5 Factors that contribute to organic reach on Facebook
1. A user’s previous interactions with page – if they’ve liked, shared and/or commented on previous posts they’re more likely to have new ones appear in their feeds organically.
2. A user’s previous interactions with post type – if they like every video you post then they’ll see your videos, for example.
3. The interactions from other users who saw the post – Facebook starts by showing new content to a small set of your followers (based on #1 and #2 above) if those people engage with it (likes, shares, comments) then Facebook will include the post in more user’s feeds.
4. Any complaints or negative feedback – if a user reports your post to Facebook or says they’re not interested in content like this then Facebook won’t show it to them.
5. When it was posted – new content is the most interesting and as it ages it becomes less interesting. There isn’t much you can do about this factor other than just knowing it contributes to Facebook including your content on user’s timelines.
Based on those five factors, think about what you may be able to do in order to increase your chances of having your posts gain some traction through organic reach.
In my opinion, the one we have most control over is consistency. We need to be posting often so that Facebook considers what we post "interesting". If you do nothing else, start with that!