New tactics to improve your Facebook reach

Last week, I posted an article about the current status concerning Facebook traffic. I shared the fact that for Yoast.com, the Facebook referral traffic is decreasing. I also asked you all whether or not you noticed something similar and invited you to share your tactics to deal with such a decrease. You left lots and lots of interesting replies, so first of all, thank you for that! Most people noticed a decrease in Facebook traffic as well. Today, I’ll share three promising tactics that were shared in the comments.

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Facebook traffic is decreasing

The majority of the people who left a comment on my blog post also noticed a big drop in referral traffic from Facebook in the past few months. Quite some people left Facebook altogether. These people didn’t notice a drop in their traffic. Most people are less active on Facebook than they used to be, but they still use it. Also, three people responded that they didn’t notice any difference. Overall, it is safe to say that the large majority of people replying to my post did notice a significant drop in Facebook referral traffic. But what can you do about it?

Tips and tactics worth trying!

I found three tips and tactics when I was reading through the dozens of comments, and I believe that they are definitely worth trying. I am not at all sure to what extent these actually work. However, these are all things that we will be trying out on our own Facebook account in the near future. So perhaps they will be of use to you as well.

Tip 1:  Posts without external links

One of our readers suggested that Facebook posts that contain external links have far less reach than those with just text or posts with video’s or images. In her case, video (and especially live video), was performing the best.

Another reader suggested pretty much the same thing. He also added that a lively discussion on the Facebook-platform can pay off.

This could be a good approach, since Facebook likes it when people stay on Facebook, instead of clicking to another website. It could well be that Facebook treats posts without external links in it differently and that these are shown to more people. We’ll definitely try this one out!

Tip 2: Facebook groups

Several commenters pointed out that although Facebook referral traffic was going down, Facebook groups were still very active. Sharing posts in active groups does seem to be paying off. Time to get active in those groups! Perhaps we should start a Yoast group on Facebook?

Tip 3: Lengthy posts

One of our readers suggested writing longer posts. His experience was that lengthy Facebook posts performed much better than short posts.

This is easy to experiment with. Adding a bit more text to a post is not that hard. We’ll be experimenting with longer and shorter texts in our posts. I’ll keep you informed on the results of this tactic!

If you want to experiment with these tactics, but don’t have the time to write every social post by hand, we might have a solution. With our Zapier integration in Yoast SEO Premium you can automate your social sharing without losing control of what your social posts look like. You determine what the social posts contain, allowing you to try the tips mentioned above, and these custom social posts will be automatically shared to your social networks every time you publish new content.

Conclusion

Although Facebook referral traffic is decreasing, there are some tactics we can use in order to get some of that traffic back. Perhaps investing in lengthy, well-written Facebook posts without external links will do the trick. You will not get those people to your site then, but your reach on Facebook will remain intact. That’s something to consider. We’re going to try out all three tactics we discussed in this post. We’ll keep you informed about our findings!

Read more: How to optimize your Facebook reach »