Six effective marketing strategies to counter declining reach of Facebook marketing

According to a report by Locowise, a social analytics and reporting firm, the average reach of Facebook organic post is between 0.2 - 2.6 per cent!

This is may be why amid the extremely crowded Facebook newsfeed it has become increasingly challenging for brands to gain organic visibility.

At iScribblers, apart from the traditional Facebook marketing techniques, we use alternative promotional and marketing strategies that have yielded notable results for our clients. In this article, I’ve listed the 6 most effective alternate marketing strategies to counter the declining Facebook marketing reach.

#1. Optimise the type, time and frequency of posting – Socialbakers, a firm that analyses social media profiles sampled 4,445 brand pages and more than 670,000 posts (between October 2014 to Feb 2015) to conclude that the organic reach of videos was 8.7 per cent, status posts 5.8per cent, link posts 5.3 per cent and image posts 3.7 per cent.

The ideal time and day to post on Facebook is debatable. Studies show that brand engagement is 18 per cent higher on Thursday and Friday, posting between 9 am and 7 pm gives the best results but for some brands posting at non-peak hours has worked well. The ideal number of posts should be a balance between being informative and maintaining the number of posts from getting into an annoying level.

There is no holy grail to the right time and frequency of posting on Facebook. It would make sense to post at times that suit the target audience’s demographics (tools Fanpage Karma and Facebook Insights), and to measure the response and iterate accordingly.

#2. Build audience on other social networks – The mammoth amount of content being shared on Facebook has lowered its organic reach. To counter the declining reach of Facebook marketing, start using other smaller platforms such as Vine, Snapchat, Pinterest and Tumblr, which have highly engaged audience.

Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram are effective for B2C businesses such as fashion, retail, food and entertainment while brands wanting to reach out to the professional audience sector should use LinkedIn and SlideShare. Viral video marketing and promotion is effective on video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vine. If your target audience’s age group is teenagers and millenials, Snapchat is one surefire way to convey the brand message to this audience segment.

It would be worthwhile to do research on the networks that are being used by your audience, and to use one as the primary marketing channel supplemented by a secondary network.

#3. Content syndication – Content syndication would mean that content creators increase the reach and lifespan of their content by allowing other websites/publications to post this content or links to the same on their own websites. This platform is used to increase the traffic to company blogs.

Instead of buying ads, you buy spaces for your promotion which is either shown as “related posts” or “similar articles across the web”. This includes showing images and titles with links to the post on the syndication websites.

Content syndication leverages multiple benefits for brands which are developing high quality content:

• Guest blogging is time consuming, but content syndication allows one to post links of existing articles on multiple websites.
• The shelf life of the content piece is increased, because one can syndicate an evergreen article on high authority websites to drive additional viewership.
• Guest blogging is restricted to certain networks while content syndication expands online footprints dramatically.

Discovery platforms like Outbrain, Zemanta and Taboola allow easy syndication of your content across a large network of publishers. This type of syndication has been used for a long time and has helped many brands gain huge amount of traffic and visibility.

#4. Include promoted/paid posts on viral websites – Rather than struggling for long hours to make entertaining videos, consider partnering with third party websites such as BuzzFeed and EliteDaily to create and promote highly engaging videos.

These sites are experts at creating viral videos and the videos, when shared on their social networks, garner high traffic to the brand. This video created by BuzzFeed for Purina’s Tidy Cats (a cat food brand) generated 22,000,000+ views.

Paid posting on relevant viral websites whose footfall has a huge chunk of your target audience will work wonders for your brand.

#5. Collect and leverage social data – You are renting the audience on Facebook and not owning it. Every time you want to communicate with your audience, you have to pay for it (since the organic reach is anywhere between 0.2 – 2.6 per cent).

Brands have now started collecting audience information such has contact details and emails that enable them to contact the customers directly. Once you have the contact information of your audience you don’t have to rely on Facebook to reach out to them.

#6. Paid Facebook advertising – The quickest way to increase the reach, likes and engagement for your brand is by Facebook paid advertising. Based on your business goal – increasing the number of likes, increasing the reach of a post/campaign, boosting app downloads or re-directing the visitors to the website, Facebook ads fulfil the purpose.

Precise targeting of the audience, appearing in the newsfeed of the custom audience and being less expensive compared to Google AdWords has made 84 per cent marketers use Facebook ads (2015 report by Social Media Examiner) to expand the reach of their business.

Facebook is an effective playground for your marketing, yet don’t overrule the effectiveness of other platforms which are equally potential to increase the reach of your brand.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)