Here are some top tips on how to increase organic engagement, and why they work. The one thing you need to STOP doing on Facebook, is posting for the sake of posting. It really is a waste of your time, energy, and money. If your heart’s not in it, or you don’t see the value of having social channels and are just doing so because you don’t want to be left out – then you’re better of without them.
You’ll only get frustrated when no-one is seeing your posts, and start thinking that social is a load of old balls. Well, it is a load of old balls if you’re not going to do it properly – but never fear, JPG are here!
The lifecycle of a social media platform
Firstly, it’s pretty important to understand how social platforms work, as all of them tend to follow a fairly similar pattern.
To begin with, social platforms start off offering lots of organic reach for posts. This is to attract users who find they can build a following fairly quickly, so get into using the platform and encouraging more people to join.
Once sign-ups slow, the platform needs to find new ways of increasing growth, and they seem to do this by reducing organic reach and pushing their paid advertising options in order to reach more of their followers, and to continue to grow their following further.
Facebook is no exception to this, and it becomes more obvious when we take a look at the figures. At the end of 2020, the average reach for an organic post was 5.2%, a 2.5% drop from 2018, when the organic engagement average for posts was 7.7%.
The Facebook algorithm
Facebook actually uses a series of different methods in order to give every single post on the platform a score. It then uses this score to determine what it’s going to show users first in their newsfeeds.
Remember: one of Facebook’s aims with this is to keep people scrolling in order to maximise advertising revenue, so they’re absolutely going to favour posts which already have high levels of engagement.
This means that if you’re looking to improve the number of Facebook users who see your posts organically, they need to be engaging! It’s not enough to post a link to a property you have on your books with a simple house emoji, if there’s nothing to hook your audience. In fact, using too many links on posts can even be detrimental to your engagement, as Facebook want to keep people on their platform, not direct them away to external websites.
The way the newsfeed works if a user hasn’t interacted with a certain type of post for a while (or ever), Facebook will deprioritise this sort of post in their newsfeed. So if someone liked your Facebook page a long time ago but stopped engaging with your content, it’s going to stop showing them your content.
Four ranking criteria to focus on
Although according to Facebook, there are thousands of different factors that go into deciding how high a post ranks in someone’s newsfeed and these change often as they tweak the technology, the following four are mentioned by them consistently over a lot of years.
- Who a user interacts with regularly
- Type of post (whether it’s a video, image, text post, or a link)
- Post popularity
- Age of the post
So, based on this information, you need followers who regularly interact with your content, in order to keep posts showing in their feed.
Here are some ways you can encourage that level of engagement with followers you already have.
Run regular competitions
You can run these to link up with holidays. Christmas, Easter, Summer holidays, and Halloween. As well as being good for gaining new followers, it encourages lots of engagement on one post, which will help when it comes to showing the rest of your content.
Reply to your audience
both publicly and in your inbox messages. This is to build a relationship that people believe in and trust, so they’ll want to engage with your posts.
Develop local connections
Posts are more likely to show for people if their friends like it. So for Estate Agents, working in a particular area, it makes sense to get involved in, and post about community events and issues.
TOP TIP: Inspire conversation amongst friends for an organic engagement boost! If a post has inspired lots of conversation and comments from the friends of a Facebook user, it’s likely to be bumped into their feed again – even if they’ve already seen it and interacted.
Get a reaction
Love, care, laugh, sad, angry – all of these are looked upon more favourably by the Newsfeed gods than a traditional like. Create posts that make people feel things!
Post to your stories
Facebook stories are NOT a waste of time. We’ve been champions of Facebook stories for a good while. They’re fun, they’re quick, and they get great views. Why? They’re free from the constraints of the newsfeed algorithm, and they sit above it!
46% of people (according to a study conducted by Facebook) want to see tips or advice from brands on stories. So have a think about what tips and tricks you can give your audience, and get posting some short form video!
Do you want help to increase organic engagement on your social platforms?
We’re here to help, and we love it! Check out our social media services here.
Katie Gillingham
Katie is a Freelance Copywriter living in rural Dorset with her daft old Labrador. She first started writing content for the property industry back in 2015, and loves nothing more than bringing brand voices to life!
