How to optimize your Facebook reach

Social media like Facebook allow you to reach people that might be interested in your stuff. You’ll reach people who like your Facebook page, and you might even reach the friends of people who like your Facebook page. Some posts, however, seem to be much more successful than others. Why do some of your posts on Facebook get many likes, shares and comments, while others are largely ignored by your audience? In this post, I’ll help you optimize your Facebook reach.

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Best practices for increasing Facebook reach

If you want tips to be successful on Facebook make sure to read this blog post by Neil Patel. Neil analyzed 1 billion Facebook posts and his tips are really helpful to start optimizing your own Facebook page. Although we can learn a lot from his best practices, it’s very important to remember that your Facebook page and your audience are unique.

As you are trying out his tips, I would strongly advise you to analyze the reach and the engagement of your own Facebook posts. What posts does your audience like? Which posts reached a lot of people? And which posts were hardly noticed? What seems to work on your own Facebook page? And what can you learn from that? Also, make sure to check out these new tactics to improve your Facebook reach.

Start analyzing regularly

Want to be able to predict which posts will increase your reach and engagement on Facebook? Start by checking out the Insights tabs on your Facebook page. And make sure to check out these stats regularly.

Look into the reach of each post (the number of people the post was served to) and the number of likes, shares and comments. If you do this on a regular basis, you’ll begin to notice patterns.

Read more about Facebook Insights in Michiel’s post!

Important aspects to consider

Whether or not a post is successful on Facebook could be caused by countless things: the length of the post, the topic of the post, the day of the week. But it could also be caused by world events, the weather or by pure chance. You won’t be able to fully control or predict your success. However, analyzing aspects of previous posts should give you some clues about what works for your audience (and what doesn’t).

Time and day of your post

The timing of your post matters. For some time slots (like at night) competition will be low. For other time slots your audience will be more available and engaged, but there’ll also be more competition. It’s a matter of testing which day and time will be most effective. For Yoast, weekdays are much better than the weekend. This will definitely depend on your audience.

Topic of the post

You’re most likely blogging about various topics and your audience will like some of them more than others. Check what posts do well with your audience; what topics are the most successful? Try writing more posts about those topics. Additionally, you could try to make your other posts look a bit more like the ones that are successful.

Purpose of the post

Closely analyze the purpose of your post. Did you write this post to inform your readers, or to entertain them? Or, were you trying to sell your stuff? For Yoast, more “salesy” posts seem to get far less reach and engagements. Posts in which we announce a sale or introduce a new product seem to be the least successful ones in our timeline.

Illustrations or videos?

Make sure to study the reach and engagements of posts with different kinds of illustrations, photos and videos too. Do posts with illustrations differ in their reach compared to posts without illustrations? Do posts with video get more likes or shares compared to the ones without?

Be realistic with your time

If you want to share more on social, but don’t always have the time to write a social post from scratch, an automated publishing flow can be the answer. At the same time, you don’t want to compromise on the quality of your social posts. The Zapier integration in Yoast SEO Premium lets you automatically share your content on whatever platform you prefer. And you can set up exactly how these posts should look. After creating your automated publication flow, your content will be shared on a platform of your choice every time you publish a post.

Conclusion

To really understand what a successful Facebook post looks like, you really have to dive into your Facebook Insights. We’re currently taking our analysis a step further by doing an extensive research on what works on the Facebook page of Yoast.

For all of you, the ability to predict which posts are going to be successful on Facebook will also be very valuable. So go ahead and check out your Facebook Insights and start analyzing your posts!

Read more: Facebook Page Insights explained »