If you’re a small, local business you may already be on the social media bandwagon. Using sites such as Facebook helps to successfully promote your services or products to your customers. If you’re not, then you should seriously think about jumping on board. Even within local communities, not being on Facebook could make you fall behind your competitors, and we don’t want that. In this blog post, I’ll discuss how Facebook’s feature Targeted Organic Reach can help drive sales to your local businesses.
There are currently over 25 million small business pages like yours who are using Facebook to promote their business. The best thing is many of them are doing it without spending any money on paid advertising. Everyone loves free things, therefore, getting your small business on Facebook seems like a no-brainer. Being on social media provides free advertising to the people in your community, and what’s not to like about that?
If used effectively, free Facebook posting creates genuine connections which further drive customer sales. Whilst there are paid and sponsored advertising options available on Facebook, it isn’t entirely necessary to use it. Small businesses are likely to not have monstrous advertising budgets. This means free Facebook advertising could give your local business extra exposure and make a meaningful difference.
What is Organic Reach?
For those of you already using Facebook to promote your business, you might be aware of the term Organic Reach. But if you’ve not heard of it before, what it means is the number of people who see your posts without spending money on promoting it. Posting something to your business page without paying for it to be promoted, relies solely on organic reach.
In recent months, research shows that in general, the organic reach of posts is in decline. It’s now becoming more tricky to get your messages out to your followers through organic reach. This is because new algorithms on Facebook means newsfeeds are more likely to show content from friends and family – not businesses. As a result, to get your brand out there, you’ll need to find another way to promote your business on Facebook.
If you don’t pay for advertising on Facebook, it’s never been more important to make your post-high-quality, engaging content. This kind of content will obtain the highest organic reach to your followers and the local community. There are plenty of tips online about how to extend the reach of your post, by making sure it’s engaging enough to instigate interactions with your followers.
Some articles also highlight the importance of getting comments and reactions compared to likes that rank as better engagement on Facebook’s algorithms. Others suggest posting more videos to tap into the increasing number of people who watch video content on the platform. Facebook loves when your posts are engaging to your followers, and the more interaction you get on a post. The higher organic reach you’ll get, and the more exposure you’ll get and so on.
Whilst all of this is good advice, there is another feature which might make this easier for you.
Targeted Organic Reach
The best way to describe this feature is to use an example of how it could work for a business. Let’s say you’re a local charity shop, and you have a large amount of women’s clothing available at the moment. You might write a post telling your customers about the range of women’s clothes you have available.
If you posted something like this, it would go out to a small number of your followers. The organic reach of the post would rely on who saw and interacted with it. But unsurprisingly women’s clothing is not necessarily going to appeal to all your followers. For example, men aren’t likely to be interested in women’s clothing, so won’t interact with the post.
This is where Targeted Organic Reach steps in to give you a bit of a helping hand. This allows you to specify what demographic of followers you want the post to go out to. Your female followers will be interested in women’s clothing, so you’ll want to make sure they see it. Facebook says that this should help increase meaningful interactions with posts that you publish on your page. In turn, this will boost your organic reach.
This kind of targeting helps to boost interaction on your posts. The more interaction you get, the more Facebook recognises it as high-quality content, and bingo, your organic reach increases.
The best thing about this feature is that it’s free to use. Previously, you had to pay for targeted Facebook advertising. Opening this up to organic reach means local businesses with smaller marketing budgets are able to maximise their exposure.
Like they say ‘Nothing comes for free’
Despite the potential of this feature being game-changer for free advertisement and local businesses, there is always a price that will come with making this successful for you, and that price is your time. You will need to spend plenty of time understanding your followers on Facebook. This will involve experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. You’ll need to be in it for the long run, as this can take weeks or even months.
There are also other ways to target your customers on Facebook, but these will all be paid advertising.
If it is all a bit much for you, then we can help with any social media assistance you need. We have plenty of experience in creating bespoke marketing for local businesses on social media. So there’s no need to go it alone.