We all know that organic marketing on Facebook is hard. Posts created by business pages reach just 2 to 6% of the page's followers.
If you want to distribute content on Facebook, what's a content marketer to do?
In this post, we're diving into ways that you can use Facebook to improve your content's reach. Long story short: get ready to make some videos.
- Why use Facebook?
- Understanding the Facebook algorithm
- What makes Facebook unique
- How to win on Facebook
Why use Facebook Organic Marketing?
With organic reach being the sad story that it is, you might wonder if you should even bother. But Facebook is still the biggest social media network on multiple accounts. It has 2.41 billion active monthly users. 71% of American adults and 51% of American teens use the platform. It happens to be the world's third most visited site and fifth-most downloaded iOS app.
There's a good chance that your ideal target audience is logging into Facebook daily or weekly.
Plus, 39% of Facebook users say that they follow businesses in the hopes that they will receive special offers.
Although it's notoriously difficult for businesses to reach their followers, there are ways to achieve this.
Understanding the Facebook algorithm
For personal pages, organic reach is pretty easy. Which makes Facebook organic marketing a little harder. Upload a picture of your baby or your recent vacation, or write a rant, and you might get dozens of reactions and comments. For personal pages, you can get more reach simply by posting native content (not external links, but instead text, images, and videos).
However, employee advocacy isn't widely practiced on Facebook the way that it is on LinkedIn.
Most people aren't trying to use their Facebook profile to grow their professional brand, so they don't accept friend requests from people they don't know.
Of course, there is a big trend of people using their Facebook profiles for business purposes, but these are small business owners and solopreneurs.
When it comes to utilizing a personal profile, this is a dead-end for most B2B brands.
Most businesses completely give up on the Facebook algorithm and instead turn to advertisements like this.
Current best practices state that advertisers should send traffic to a product, app download, or email opt-in like the one above. That way, the advertiser can either get immediate ROI from the sale or collect a lead.
However, there are ways to utilize paid promotions for your content, which we'll cover later on.
What makes Facebook organic marketing unique
Enough bad algorithm news. Let's take a look at some of the features that make Facebook a unique and worthwhile place for content teams to spend time and resources.
The two best opportunities currently are Facebook Groups and Facebook Watch (meaning videos). Facebook organic marketing becomes easy peasy with these!
Facebook Groups are on fire
They have been going hard on promoting their Groups lately. They clearly see this as a way to stand out and create stickiness with users. They've been running ads for their Groups feature all over the internet.
Plus, posts from groups are showing up in the news feed much more often than ever before. These aren't just posts from friends, but from people in the mutual group that the user is not otherwise connected with.
If you have a Facebook group with a good amount of activity and engagement, then the Facebook algorithm will show posts to members in their newsfeed. That's pretty awesome.
Those posts will remind users to hop into your Facebook group to see what's new. You can use the header of your Facebook group and new posts to promote your top content.
Facebook Watch has a massive opportunity for businesses
The other big opportunity is Facebook video. Facebook Watch is simply the area of Facebook where users can go to see videos from every business page they follow.
In fact, it's become the only way to easily see posts from Facebook pages. If you're not making videos, it's almost the same as not existing on Facebook.
In Facebook Watch, users can scroll through videos to find ones they want to watch, and they can also click on Facebook pages they follow on the right-hand side to find new videos from their favorite pages.
How to win with Facebook organic marketing
Now let's explore some tips and tricks for winning on Facebook.
Given what we know about the state of organic marketing on Facebook, what can content teams do to drive targeted traffic to their opt-ins and offers and increase brand awareness?
Promote blog content with organic videos
Starting off with something pretty easy to implement...
Create short videos to promote your content. If you're not creating Facebook videos because you don't have a big budget or a lot of time, then you're missing out on an opportunity to show up to your followers organically in Facebook Watch.
Start by thinking smaller.
QuickBooks makes super short 5 to 10 second videos to promote their blog posts. This video simply has an animation that reads "Five ways to make the most of your time." The video links to this post with five productivity-boosting tips.
You can also use short videos to promote your email newsletter subscription, the way that Kiva does.
Use a simple online video making tool like Invideo to craft videos yourself without needing to hire a videographer or video editor. You can use animation, basic text, and stock photos and videos to make videos that introduce your content.
Create premium content like advice videos and interviews
Ready to step up your video game from short blog teasers?
There are brands that are releasing very high-quality videos on Facebook. Marie Forleo uploads the same videos that she's famous for on YouTube to Facebook. Meanwhile, LinkedIn influencer Shay Rowbottom uploads the same videos she's known for on LinkedIn to Facebook.
Yup, Facebook video can be as simple as just uploading the videos you're creating for other platforms.
Create engaging, entertaining content. Give away tips and advice so good that most companies would charge for them. Your Facebook organic marketing strategy will boom!
If you don't have awesome video equipment, lighting equipment, a sound guy on staff, and the confidence to record yourself on video, don't worry.
You can still release great video content on Facebook.
One of the easiest ways to do so is to interview experts in your field. What influencers, customers, users, and others could you invite for a twenty or thirty-minute interview? What questions could you ask them to help your audience learn something important and get better results?
You can stream a Zoom call straight to a Facebook live video, and then later upload it to YouTube and turn it into a podcast.
Sure, you'll still need a webcam, and you might want to check your hair in the mirror before you go live, but you don't need to follow a script, feel too awkward in front of the camera, or worry about setting up studio space. You'll just be one person talking to another person.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Talk to an influencer in your niche about updates or best practices for the current year
- Interview a customer about how they use your product or service
- Interview a customer about they achieve results in your business using a method or strategy that is related to your product or service
- Talk to a colleague who is in the same role as your target audience about how they excel in their career
- Interview a colleague who is knowledgeable about your target audience's business or niche
- Interview the founder of your company about the upcoming road map and where the company is headed
Set a weekly or monthly goal for the number of interviews and make sure to repurpose the content into every format you can think of: not only LinkedIn and YouTube videos but also blog posts and short social media posts.
Start a Facebook group
While you absolutely need a smart video strategy for Facebook, you might also want to interact with your audience in other ways. This is a good one for your Facebook organic marketing strategy.
Starting a Facebook group can give you a place to share content, chat strategy, and grow your community.
A Facebook group can't be just about your company and your content. You'll need to grow it into a place where your target audience feels like they can openly discuss anything related to the topic of the group. While you're building your group, make sure to devote time to answering member questions until the community gets large enough that other members take care of that for you.
Click here to see examples of successful B2B Facebook groups.
Use paid ads to boost content reach
Use custom audiences and lookalike audiences to reach your existing users and customers, or Facebook users who are connected to them or similar to them (in mysterious, Facebook-secret ways).
Webflow occasionally runs ads to their best blog posts. The following ad links to this post on how to validate startup concepts using Webflow.
While all content marketers want to get as much organic reach as possible, setting aside a small budget for promoting blog content can be worthwhile.
Boosting your content on Facebook can help...
- Increase brand awareness with new people
- Keep your brand top of mind with existing customers
- Inspire organic shares of your content
Yes, the Facebook game has changed, but that doesn't mean it's totally rigged against businesses. Via groups, videos, and a little bit of post boosting, businesses can access their target audiences.
Content marketing platform StoryChief now comes with social media management features to help you promote your content better. Learn more.
