How to Maximize your Organic Reach

As social media continues to grow, organic reach continues to diminish. It’s unfortunate, but there’s no way around the fact. The landscape is more crowded – with more businesses competing for the attention of a finite number of users. It doesn’t help things that the social media providers have a financial incentive to limit your free results.

Does that mean there can be no social media success without paid reach? There’s no easy answer to that question – so I’ll say yes and no. Yes, because we don’t recommend totally ignoring paid reach. But no because there are still ways to reach your potential customers with organic and free methods.

Successful social media marketing is all about striking a sustainable balance between organic and paid reach. Relying on organic methods will limit your ability to reach customers while relying solely on paid reach will only give your content a temporary boost. How you strike that balance? By maximize your profile for organic reach before starting on a targeted, paid campaign.

Social Media & Keywords

Keyword research isn’t just for SEO work. It is an essential part of any marketing effort – including social media. Facebook has increasingly become a search engine and that means you need to account for keyword usage on your business page.

In order of importance, here are the places you should invest with keyword resources:

• The title of your page
• The category and sub-category
• Your bio/business description
• Individual Posts

If your goal is organic reach, then you need people finding you organically. And that means optimizing your social media accounts with the right keywords. Start at the top and work your way down with a comprehensive keyword strategy.

Branded Content

Here we shift from the SEO world of keyword research to the more traditional marketing discipline of creating target personas. The number one thing you want people to see on social media is your original content. It is the most likely to convert new customers.

If you want engagement with your branded content, you need to be producing what your customers are looking for. This is marketing 101, but somehow it gets lost when making the shift to social media. Create target personas, do competitor research, find influencers in your niche and get to work creating content that meets your customers’ needs.

Curated Content

You want to reach with your original content, but if all you do on social media is promote you’ll turn off your audience. To combat getting too salesy on social media, you should be regularly sharing content created by others.

This will show your audience that you’re here to engage, not just sell. This method will build trust will your audience – and encourage them to interact with your content.

A Little Help from your Friends

Don’t be too proud to ask for help. One of the best ways to boost your organic reach is to ask your friends for help. Because social media algorithms favor content performs well at first, you can get a huge boost with a few early likes.
There are several ways to get this early posting help.

The simplest is to ask friends, colleagues, or employees to engage with your content shortly after posting it. For the more adventurous, you can create advocate groups (Facebook Messenger is a great tool for facilitating this) that help each other out. The idea here is to let the group know whenever someone puts up a new post – and the other members go out and like or share the content.

It takes a bit more work, but this advocate method can work wonders for your organic reach.

Social Interactions

The number one way to encourage engagement and build organic reach: be engaged yourself. This means answering questions, liking comments, and generally just being social. No one goes on Facebook to interact with a faceless business – they come for the sense of community and interactions.

If you want people to engage with your content, make sure you are putting a real, human behind your social media. Bots can be a huge help, but at the end of the day you need real people willing to interact.

Social Media Marketing

By maximizing your organic social media reach, you’ll be primed to effectively start a paid campaign as well. By making sure that your profile is attractive to your target audience first, you can know that when you do start spending your money on advertising your content is on the mark and ready to convert.

Social media isn’t optional for businesses anymore. And it isn’t something to do as an afterthought. It needs to be front-and-center in your marketing and advertising strategies. Is yours?

If not, Fusion Group USA can help get your social media presence on track through both organic and paid reach. Let us do the hard work while you reap the rewards!