When you’re trying to promote your brand on social media while sticking to a tight budget, you want to make sure you reach as many people as possible without paying for too many ads. That’s where your organic reach comes in. Organic reach is a measure of the people your content reaches without assists from paid ads across social media platforms.
Recently, updated algorithms across social media platforms have made it considerably more difficult for businesses to grow their organic reach in favor of promoting paid ads. But While reaching people organically might be trickier than it used to be, it’s definitely not impossible.
Here are 5 strategies that will help you increase your organic reach and keep your content where your audience will see it.
1. Quality over quantity
The most important thing you can do to help your organic reach is to produce quality content. Social media is full of junk articles, poorly constructed graphics, and bad writing. Why? Because many content producers believe that putting a lot of content out will result in more views. In reality, it’s just the opposite.
If the content you publish is high quality – more people will see it. Your audience will share quality content with their friends and people will engage with content that they enjoy.
2. Be consistent
Not only do you need to create quality content, but you need to post it consistently. This doesn’t mean flooding your followers feeds with 15 posts a day, but it does mean you should develop a posting schedule and stick with it.
Your social media pages should be viewed as a clear form of communication between your business and your customers. If you’re not posting regularly, people won’t view your page as that important connection – out of sight out of mind. But when you’re posting reliably and putting out content that your audience wants your audience will look forward to viewing your posts.
ESPN is a great example of a brand that reliably posts quality content that its audience is interested in.
3. Interact with your followers
When someone comments on your content, what do you do? If your answer isn’t, “reply to as many comments as I can,” you might want to revisit your strategy. People comment on content because they want to engage in conversation with you and the other people who are seeing the content.
Your part in the conversation shouldn’t end when you post the content, it should continue for as long as people are engaging with you. When you encourage conversation you’re encouraging overall engagement which will force the algorithms to increase your organic reach.
4. Utilize live video
Video content is massively popular across social media and live video tends to be even more engaging than prerecorded content. There are a lot of fun things you can do with live video to keep things fresh and interesting for your audience.
The team at Benefit cosmetics regularly sets aside time during their live videos to ask the audience what they want to see next, encouraging even more engagement with viewers.
5. Know your audience
Understanding your audience will naturally guide you in the right direction for better organic reach. Incorporating multiple platforms into your social media strategy is important, but you should pay attention to where your audience hangs out the most and focus your efforts there. What times are they usually on? And what kind of content have they reacted well to in the past?
Use your analytics to learn this information and build off of what you know. If your audience is older and more professional, you’ll probably want to utilize Facebook more than Instagram, and if you have a younger audience, Instagram and Snapchat might be where you want to target your efforts.
Working around social media algorithms to reach your audience organically will take work, but it’s still possible. Certain strategies will ensure that your content has the potential to get in front of viewers without the need to spend a lot on ads. Put the right pieces in place and you’ll see the results.
