Engagement and reach on Facebook are hard to achieve with such a complex algorithm behind the site. However, reach is integral for maintaining a business profile and nurturing your organic audience into potential customers. So, how do we beat the Facebook algorithm in order to ensure widespread brand recognition?

Here are our top tips for Facebook best practices.

1. Post Links In The First Comment

This may seem strange but posting links to articles and your website inside a post on Facebook means the site will likely restrict the number of your followers who see the content. But why? Facebook dislikes posts that take users outside of Facebook and off of the site.

One way around this is to create your post, but leave the links to post in the top comment. Explain in the post that links can be found in the comments and interested parties will still click on the links. If you do this Facebook will no longer see the post as taking people away from the site, and you will achieve a wider reach.

2. Create Engaging Content

This tip is less of a trade secret and more of a well known and effective technique to maintain engagement on Facebook. Understand what your audience likes, and develop these forms of media, topics and content for use on your Facebook page. Engaging content is recognised by Facebook who will reward you with a wider reach on posts, as they know your audience likes, and more importantly interactively participates, in your content.

Engaging content will also mean Facebook users react to the post. It is widely considered that posts with different react symbols tend to get wider-reach than ones with just ‘like’ reactions.

Moreover, readers will be more inclined to read a post with the ‘wow’ emoji or the ‘love’ reaction compared to just a ‘like’. Reactions show the content provokes opinion, meaning readers are more inclined to click through to the article.

3. Use The Latest Technology

Keep up to date with the latest trends and experiment with them for your business. Technologies like Chatbots may seem a little daunting to set up but once you know how they work, you will see really effective results. These bots will answer instant questions any time of day via Facebook engagement messenger. This will help your Facebook reach as the site sees your account as active, replying to your followers. Facebook will reward you for your fast replies and the chatbots will mean you can effectively use Messenger as a marketing device.

4. Create Videos

We can’t escape the fact that videos are the most important and popular form of content. Did you know that Facebook generates 8 billion video views on average per day? Therefore, if brands want to be noticed on Facebook they’ve got to make use of this medium. Start off with simple moving graphics and images created on Adobe Spark or Boomerang. Or even use Facebook’s very easy to create, slideshows for boosted posts.

Why not try Facebook live stories as this holds an intimate audience that allows interaction and targeted content without needing to invest in an expensive setup.

5. Boost Posts

Organic reach is preferable. However, with the amount of content posted every day it’s not always achievable. A way around this problem is to use boosted posts. Remember that putting money behind posts and creating sponsored content is also a great way to beat the algorithm. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to achieve a wide-reaching post either. Just make sure that you target your posts to the appropriate and most responding audience. Boosted posts are effective as you’re targeting your content to a group of consumers who are familiar with your work, and more than likely happy to see more from you.

These simple steps are the ideal way to start targeting posts to your audience, defeating the Facebook algorithms and getting your brand out there.

At Image Matters, we’re experts in all things social media, so get in touch here to learn more about how you can effectively target your content on Facebook, as well as other platforms.