How to Maximize Your Organic Reach on Social Media

Social media is an endless fountain of potential for online businesses, brands, and bloggers.

For the longest time, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have suddenly become so large and popular that the ability for posts to obtain a high level of organic reach has all but disappeared.

What’s the next step then? Should we all start boosting posts and promoting tweets? Well, you could do that, but organic reach isn’t quite dead yet.

There are still ways to squeeze engagement and views out of your top platforms. Today we’ll look at the best practices for getting the most out of your social media efforts.

Maximizing Your Organic Reach on today’s Major Platforms

Today I’ll show you proven strategies for increasing your organic reach on the social media platforms you know and love, and maybe one or two you haven’t thought of.

Once you’ve finished making your website, the next step will be promoting your content on these platforms.

You may not have the budget for a marketing campaign, so you’ll need every view, like, retweet, and anything else you can get. While organic reach has declined significantly in recent years, there’s still potential for it to help spread your content.

These actionable tips are focused on the here and now. Make sure you always stay up-to-date on the rapidly changing social media marketing trends so you can adapt these strategies accordingly.

Reaching Your Audience on Facebook

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: Facebook. It’s no secret that this platform has seriously limited the ability for you to easily reach your audience.

As more and more businesses flocked to Facebook, their competing posts resulted in over 1,500 posts on average per each user’s feed.

Facebook had to find a way to sort through everything and provide only the most relevant information in the news feed. This led to algorithm switches that rattled the organic reach of businesses on social media.

In the interesting of curating the 3 million links that are shared every hour, and creating more engagement on the news feeds of users, these changes had to be made.

To reach more people, we need to look at how Facebook’s news feed algorithm functions and then we can use that to find new strategies. According to Facebook themselves, the goal of the news feed is the following:

“The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them.”

Given that, we can also look at the factors that Facebook uses to decide what appears on a user’s feed:

• How recently the post went live
• The number of likes, comments, and shares
• How often the user has interacted with the page
• Past engagement with the post type

Given all of this information, how do you realistically increase your organic reach on Facebook? Here are some awesome tips courtesy of Quicksprout:

• Be open and honest with your fans/customers
• Create enjoyable and positive experiences for your fans
• Post at non-peak hours (between 10PM and 3AM)
• Share original and exclusive photos of your team and your business
• Ask questions and listen to your community
• Post infographics and other self-explanatory photos

A great tool for creating infographics or pictographics is a free online resource called Canva. This is a great way to make professional looking visuals without a need for graphic design training.

Standing Out on Twitter

Twitter has always been a beacon of organic reach when compared to Facebook. In recent years, Twitter boasted a 30% organic engagement over Facebook’s paltry 5%. Both platforms offer paid advertising options, but Twitter has always been more inclined to favor organic tweets.

In January of 2016, the company rolled out a catch-up feed similar to Facebook’s news feed. This algorithm-based idea is similar to what FB does, but here the chosen posts exist above the standard feed that shows tweets in a reverse chronological order.

The tweets included in this feed won’t be entirely based on promotions or paid advertisements either. The tweets placed here will be based on organic engagement like favorites or retweets, in addition to paid promotion.Twitter VP-Revenue Product Ameet Ranadive said in an interview:

“This is a change that essentially makes all content on Twitter created equal. So this is not a pay-to-play platform, unlike our competitors. The best content, whether it’s from a celebrity, another user, or a brand, is always going to be what rises to the top.”

The news feed is an optional feature that users can turn on for their personal accounts. Because Twitter users receive every tweet from every account they follow, increasing your reach here is all about timing and catching their attention. Consider these actionable strategies:

• Post on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays
• Tweet near 1PM for maximum retweets and 12PM/6PM for the highest engagement
• Include eye-catching images in your tweets
• Ask a question or state a statistic
• Use proper hashtags to categorize your tweets

The Power of LinkedIn

There are currently over 400 million users on LinkedIn and 100 million people who use the platform consistently on a monthly basis. This platform boasts a 20% organic reach average, which jumps to 60% if you make the effort to post at least twenty times per month.

If your company also has at least a hundred connections, you can use a feature called targeted status updates to focus the reach of your posts to a specific portion of your audience. Think of it like customizing your organic reach.

Harnessing the potential of LinkedIn involves many of the same strategies we’ve covered on other platforms, but there are some new ones as well:

• Post only during the week and in the morning hours
• Share industry insights and relevant information
• Post at least 20 times each month

The Hidden Potential of Instagram

Instagram has gone from zero to hero in a short amount of time and represents one of the few places where you can find a high organic reach and engagement from your followers without the need for paid promotion.

In a study done by Forrester that looked at 2,500 brand posts across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, they found that the Instagram posts had 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter!

With so much potential, it’s easy to see why people would want to flock to this new player in the game. An important thing to note is that content shared on Instagram can also be posted on Facebook.

This is done by using the auto-post feature which will place the content on both places when you share it. Beyond simply using the platform, implement these actionable steps to increase your visibility and reach:

• Showcase user-generated content
• Maintain your voice and image across all platforms
• Utilize relevant hashtags
• Cross promote your other social media platforms

Final Thoughts

While some platforms like Facebook may create “pay-to-win” space, there are still ways to achieve an organic reach on social media, especially if you dig into some of the rising stars like LinkedIn and Instagram. How do you maximize your organic reach on social media?

Let us know in the comments below!