Improving Organic Reach on Social Media

It seems that the more time that goes by, the more your organic reach is reduced on the social media, to the point where it might only be a fraction today of what it was five years ago. There are many reasons for this decline, but you don't have to accept that loss of organic reach as a way of life, because there are still some things you can do to improve on those numbers. Here are some of the best ways to boost your organic reach back up to something like an acceptable number.

Understand the algorithms

One of the first things you need to do in order to improve your organic reach is to acquire a thorough understanding of the algorithms used on the social media platform you're using. There are just a few basic guidelines used by the majority of the social media platforms for prioritizing posts, the first of those being how recently your post was published. The next most important idea is how relevant those posts might be to the general audience on the platform. The last really important factor in assigning priority to a post is how an audience has reacted to some of your posts, in terms of shares, comments, or likes. If you consider how these principles can be applied to all your posts, you will go a long way toward improving your organic reach.

Try going live

One of the best ways of gaining user engagement and following is to post live videos on whatever social media platform you're using. Use these live videos to inform followers about upcoming events, product demos, to have fun Q & A sessions, or simply to help users get to know your production team. Once you've produced a number of live videos, they can be re-used at a later date if they garnered genuine interest the first time around.

Include content generated by users

The reason this is important is that user-generated content is often seen as the most authentic, and is, therefore, the most influential type of content that is used by individuals to make a purchasing decision. More than 50% of consumers declare that they have made purchases based on either reading a review by another user or seeing a video posted by another user that heavily influenced their decision.

Establish a content budget

If you don't mind spending a little extra money, another good way of fighting against the decline in organic reach is to make use of the numerous ad options available to you, so that you can give an extra boost to your updates. One of the best and most useful options at your disposal is targeting your specific user audience because once you thoroughly know your customer, you can be much more effective in making your pitch through content tailored to them. For each post that you make, consider your audience and customize the post to those individuals, targeting them with ad options available to you.

Generate unique content for various platforms

This is another good way to fight the declining numbers on your organic reach. Whatever specific tools are available to you on each platform, you should use these to generate more engagement on that particular network. For instance, you can use Instagram Stories, Twitter Moments, poll stickers on Instagram Stories, and a number of other special tools to increase engagement. This will be something different from merely posting videos and pictures, and it will provide your most interested followers with more motivation to follow your business on the specific platform being used.

Instagram Stories

Although this is obviously specific to an individual platform, it is a great way to expand your organic reach. By the strategic use of hashtags and hashtag location stickers inside the framework of your Stories, you will be able to significantly expand your reach on this platform. The success of Instagram Stories has been widely acknowledged in the industry, so if you make clever use of this tool, you're virtually certain to gain a larger audience.

Post high-quality content

This doesn't mean that your posts all need to be composed with immaculate English and sophisticated diction. What it means is that the content you post needs to add value to your audience, and to either solve a problem they have or entertain them in a way that makes them want to read more of your posts. In order to find out just what it is that appeals to your audience, be direct and conduct a survey to ask them exactly what their wants and needs are. Find out what kinds of videos they enjoy watching, what kinds of issues they struggle with, and how you can help them solve their day-to-day problems.

Influencer marketing

The key to being so successful with this approach is to find and use the right influencers, and these will be people who are appealing to your target audience and will attract the right kind of consumers to your business. To really be effective using influencer marketing, you'll have to conduct some research to find out who would make a good representative for your company, and who really has influence with your target audience. Once you've done this, however, you should notice a lot more traffic coming to your business site, and a much-expanded reach on the social media.

Analytics

You might be wondering how Analytics can slow the decline of your organic reach on social media. By paying close attention to user behaviors and what really appeals to them, you should be able to re-create the most successful posts and stay with that genre in order to expand and maintain user engagement. This will also allow you to jettison those things that are not working very well, so you don't spend time and effort on tactics that are simply not getting through to your users. The real value of Analytics is that it will allow you to focus your efforts on the most successful strategies, so that you can continue to boost your organic reach, instead of witnessing its decline.