Way to reset Facebook page Reach sending patterns

[Atomicx]

I have a client that posts a bunch of really poorly formatted and nonengaging content on her a Facebook business page. This has caused her reach to be very low, despite having 9000 real followers. Due to a history of poor content and therefore low engagement Facebook just does not send her stuff out anymore.

Is there a way to change that? I heard you could reset that notion by staying off the page for a couple of weeks and then beginning to post once more with better stuff. Is that remotely true?

[EricaMcGillivray]

At Moz, we're using a software solution called RivalIQ to help track what our competitors are sharing and resharing article shares that are working for them (and relevant to our audience). I really like that they send out easy-to-read emails, and we can quickly set these up.

[pasware]

Our Facebook page reach was declining along with everyone else's over the past few months. There were some posts that, although quality content and well-formatted, were reaching less than 1% of our audience.

Something changed mid-August though, and now our organic reach is much much better (an average of 8% per post). I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is, but I don't think it's related to paid advertising. I've been reluctant to pay to boost any posts, although we did test one in July, and it had no immediate impact on the reach of our other posts.

From what I've looked at regarding our content, here are some things that I think have played the biggest factor in our reach improvement:

1. Evergreen content: I went back to our website and picked some of our past posts that still get consistently high search traffic and re-shared them as "classic" posts.

2. External/curated content: Some websites (like Mashable, TechCrunch, etc.) have proven reach on Facebook. Where it's relevant to your audience, it's worth sharing a Facebook post (or more) from one of these media outlets. I also shared our content that existed on other platforms (SlideShare, namely), and saw those posts get better reach over time.

3. Optimized post timing: I post 5x a day on Facebook (3 in the morning and 2 in the late afternoon). I never would've planned on scheduling posts for the late afternoon, but when I looked at the post insights on Facebook, it was obvious that there was another bump in our audience behavior between 5-9pm. Look for those smaller peaks in your insights, and optimize some posts for those timeframes.

4. Tags and hashtags: where possible, use popular hashtags in your post to help boost discoverability. Same thing goes for tagging other Facebook pages in your post. More likely to get likes and shares from these tactics.

I actually just wrote a blog post about this today, and said more or less the same thing as above. Still, if you're interested in some longer reading, here it is: http://articles.bplans.com/went-vacation-increased-facebook-traffic-300-heres/

• Jonathan Michael
  Community Manager
  Bplans.com

[EricaMcGillivray]

You're not the only one who's frustrated. Unfortunately, this is what happens when we're using essentially a free service. They can change the game on you at any point as they own it and you don't even have a paid stake in it. This is one reason why at Moz, we heavily invest on our on-site community like this q&a forum, YouMoz (our UGC blog), and the comments on both our main blog and YouMoz.

[Atomicx]

That is a good response. Helpful

Am I the only one who finds it irritating that I spend money with Facebook to get likes, and then have to spend more money just to get my stuff to my fans..who I already paid FB to acquire?

[EricaMcGillivray]

1. Honestly, I have no idea if that will work. But it never hurts to experiment. And it sounds like you're in a position where nothing is really happening and it's not going to hurt you to try.

2. Well, if you aren't willing to spend the money, there's really no other way to boost the post to get engagement. The average number of followers brands have on Facebook is around 13,000, which 400 of them isn't a small segment, and Facebook is a Catch-22 of the only way your posts get more traction is if people are liking them. In August, Facebook also upped how much they will show one user your paid promotion from 1 time a day to 2.

Earlier this year, Jim Tobin at Ignite did some tests/stats and found that your Daily Organic Reach = -22 + (Total Likes x 5.399%) + (Daily Paid Reach x 0.327%) + (Page Views x 0.416%) + (Weekend [1 if yes, 0 if no] x -194.4) + (Posts Per Day x 81.08). Which means that Paid Reach factors significantly into whether or not people will see your posts, regardless of quality.

[Atomicx]

1. Will this reset some of the metrics? That is what I am planning on doing if so. Going to leave a message saying we will be gone for a week, but here is a promo code.

2. We find Facebook ads are overprices for boosting posts. They are great for getting likes but the post boosting gets poor results and are much too expensive. Will cost 10 dollars to send our post out to 400 of our fans which is absurd.

[Atomicx]

I have been managing her page for long enough to know the likes are not fakes. We run Facebook ads to gain new likes. Most of them are from that

[EricaMcGillivray]

I'd test a couple things:

1. Stay off the page for a week or so. I'd post a message to the followers before doing this to let them know this is happening. Something like "this page is vacation and will be back XXX."

2. Since it sounds like you're going to be posting good content going forward, I'd suggest taking out ads to push your content out. You can even select it to show them to your existing audience. You don't have to spend much money. (I've done ads for nonprofits were I spent $20 tops.) This will help you get that reach, but also show that your content is relevant.

[chrissmithps]

When you say Facebook stop sending her stuff out what do you mean? are the followers all genuine as well and are you sure that another company hasn't gone ahead and purchased any Likes for the page. Purchased likes are cheap as chips these day's and you will find that you get an influx of likes but you never get any Likes or post engagement with these because they are generally just fake accountants controlled by bots.