Whether you are a brand or publisher, you have a Facebook page and you’d like it to do better. That’s good, because I’m going to tell you three very easy things you can do immediately to help you get more reach, more engagement and more page fans.

Post natively. If you’re doing this already – great. But for many brands and especially publishers it is commonplace to use a 3rd party tool that publishes to Facebook for them. Unfortunately this kills your organic reach. There are no official figures for this reach loss, but all the data we’ve seen suggests that up to 30% simply disappears when auto-posting.

Post native video content. “But how can I monetize Facebook video?” “Where’s the direct traffic?” “I want my viewers on YouTube.” Like it or not, native Facebook video content is absolutely dominating Facebook right now. I could write you an essay packed full of examples to convince you, but right now I’ll summarise:

Facebook video benefits from a huge reach boost. Organic reach for your page’s other posts is dragged up by video content. You will be seen more regularly in newsfeeds with video. Users do not even need to actively engage for Facebook to recognise its importance – a few seconds letting it autoplay is enough to count as a view. The content doesn’t need to be high production quality. It shouldn’t be long. Right now, 7-30 second long videos which give a sweet, disposable payoff are the hottest ticket on Facebook. If you can take part, then do it.

Choose the right page category. No I don’t mean rush out and change your website’s page to “Media/News/Publishing” no matter who you are. But I do mean that if you genuinely are a publisher and posting several times a day – get yourself in the correct category. It will help boost your initial reach (how many people see your post before any engagement happens). It will allow you to post more often. Publishers can post upwards of 20, sometimes 30 times a day and get a consistent initial reach of 10% of their page likes.

Bonus Tip:

• Remove the star rating on your Facebook page unless you’re a Cafe or Restaurant.
  This is something that’s not a major problem, but there are so many pages who’ve just filled in all the fields Facebook asks for, so you end up with a Radio Station on Facebook sitting there with 7 random ‘reviews’ in quite a prominent space on their Facebook page. Of course most people don’t visit the FB page, preferring to see content directly in-stream, but when someone hovers over your name on Facebook, they’ll see that redundant information. Get rid of it.

If you’ve got all of these things covered then well done and be sure to let us know how it’s working out for you.

Steve