Hi everyone. My name’s Daniel. I’m a 24-year-old digital native whose entire existence revolves around social media (primarily Facebook).

Good branded content on social media is rare, but not hard to find. It floats to the top of your newsfeed because the algorithm at Facebook favours the content that people love. Not only does it reward it with a cheap CPM, but it gives it access to the holy grail of social media marketing… Organic reach.

Organic reach… What is it?

Facebook organic reach occurs when your content appears on a newsfeed, without you paying for it to be there.

In the current social media climate it’s a rare commodity, but this wasn’t always the case.

In the beginning, all reach was created equ… Sorry – In the beginning, all Facebook reach was organic. As a page, you’d put a post up and all your fans would see it, without any money being put behind it.

But dark days were coming…

Soon, there was just too much content for any one Facebook-er to see, so an algorithm was developed. Brands began paying to have their content shown in the newsfeed.

How time has flown and organic reach flown right by… Data suggests that now, the average branded Facebook post has only 6.5% organic reach, with the remaining being paid.

To someone who’s just joined the social media scene, organic reach falls well and truly into the “digital relic” category, alongside things like “music ownership” and the “iPod Shuffle”.

You’ll hear members of the old marketing guard talking about the glory days, “When I was your age, you didn’t have to pay for reach. You’d put up a post, and they’d all see it! All of your fans! But what you’re telling me, you upstart, is that I have to pay to reach people that already ‘like’ my page? Get out of my shared office space!”

That’s exactly what we’re saying.

But before you lose all hope, and shift your entire marketing budget into letter box drops *shudder*, we ought to let you know...

Organic reach isn’t dead, it’s just hidden in engaging content.

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In order to generate organic reach, brands need to create content that gets noticed and sparks conversation. You need to understand what your audience is going to respond to, but this isn’t as simple as picking something out of a hat; it’s about experimentation and pushing boundaries. Good content doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful content. The stuff that works often isn’t what you’d expect, which is why it’s important to rely on the data above the preference of the chairman’s wife.

Facebook is the perfect platform to road test brand ideas and concepts.

You do a post, you look at the data, you optimise and you progress.

Using this process of ongoing optimisation, we’ve managed to develop active and engaging Facebook communities for several of our clients, each with a growing ratio of organic to paid reach.

For one, we see between 20-30% organic reach on sponsored content, and have an audience that interacts enthusiastically with the user generated content (UGC) that they themselves send in.

For another of our clients, we’ve built a community that comes to our page not just for the latest post, but to converse with the brand. Engagement for this client is so high, that we get between 50-80% organic reach on every post, with some reaching over 200k people without any spend behind them.

Whatever the brand, product or category, you need to create content that your audience will love and interact with – this means you want at least a 10% engagement rate.

For this reason, none of these success stories happened overnight. For each we had to experiment with different types of content, audiences and response styles, but as I mentioned earlier, Facebook lends itself to this process of ongoing optimisation.

You do a post, you look at the data, you optimise and you progress.

Moral of the story?

• Don’t be afraid to try something different.
• Let the data decide what works and what doesn’t.
• Create the content that your audience wants to see, not the content you want them to see.

Have a read over our Mr Rental Case Study (if you’re game), to see how we transitioned their Facebook page from a complaints board to a community.