As I always point out, social networks are businesses and they need to make money. They don’t want to make happy business that are using their free services, they want to make them a bit happy and get them to pay for services. But they still leave some open doors, which you, as a business, can use to get to your already ‘acquired’ community (Fans/Followers).  It’s your job to find a way to get to your audiences on a regular basis, if paid or not, you have to find the right mix.  For finding the right mix you need experience and dedicate time into research on what works best.

But I won’t leave it like that, I will give you 5 tips where to start optimizing the outreach to your community.

1. Target the right audience

Start by defining your target audience exactly and learn as much as possible about them. Volume  is important, but don’t exaggerate.  Better have few that are in your target audience and convert them, than lots of people who will never convert into your business goal. Think also about targeting from a specific timezone and based on your business coverage, else : “Few million facebook fans, but do they reflect the brand target group?

2. Find out when the most people are online

Keep in mind that your whole community(fans/followers) is not always online at the same time. Why? Because nobody stays 24 hours a day with their eyes on a social network to see what’s new and there are people living in different time zones.

And here comes Time decay into the game which is an important factor on social networks. Your content is highlighted in the first minutes, if no one interacts, it will vanish.  It’s still visible on your account but not where the user sees the latest content.

So we have a community which is never 100% online at the same time and a Time Decay to the content you are publishing which leads us to a low reach of about 5%.

At this point you have to research when the most of your community is online. That’s the moment you want to post, to reach as much as possible of the community.

3. Create attractive content with only one call to action

Content pushed on Social Networks has to be  short, clear, attractive and have only one call to action. Why only one call to action? Say, we have a call to action which should bring the user to the website and another one for creating engagement in the same post. The User clicks on the website link and has no chance to engage with the post, because he’s out of the social network. Or the second case, he interacts with the posts and forgets to click on the website link. Or the third and worst case, he’s just confused and looks for further posts.

4.Push the same theme through different content

You won’t be able to catch all your community by just posting once on a specific theme. But that doesn’t mean you have to spam your community with the same repetitive message.

Even if you would get only 5% of the community see your post each time, you never know if those are the same. Best thing to do is to share your theme in different posts treating the theme from different angles and with different images. This way you make sure the 5% you already reached finds something new about your theme.

5. Use advertising for you community

Nobody said social media is free. You can have free reach, a really good one if you optimize, but you can have even more if you advertise. Advertising your posts can help to overcome the Time Decay problem. But that doesn’t mean to ignore points 1-4 from above, you still want organic reach which you don’t have to pay for and quality engaging content. I usually recommend to have at least a 24 hours running ad for one post, to reach the most of your community. If the community is small, you shouldn’t spend too much per post. If you have a longer campaign leave ads for a post run for more time, but push the same amount of money per day as you would for a 24 hours post advertising. (24 hours advertising budget * days)

 

The approach you can take:

1. Target only your community which you made sure that is your target audience. (+ the friends of your community members)

2. Make sure you know when they are online, post at that time and start the advertising in the same time.

3. Don’t forget Content has to be  short, clear, attractive and have only one call to action.

4. Publish different content for the same Theme from different angles.

5. Enjoy having a great reach.

 

So, here we are, stop whining and do something about it. What is your tip on how to have more reach on Social Networks?