Facebook is an incredible platform for expanding your Arts Business’ reach. With 2.7 billion users worldwide and 1.79 billion daily users, it is officially the world’s largest social media platform.

But, with a growing advertising market and an increased focus on businesses, it is becoming increasingly tricky to grow organically.

This doesn’t make it impossible though!

With the huge increase in users and therefore content, Facebook has an algorithm in place to filter posts dependent on the viewer’s behaviour and previous interactions. This means certain posts are prioritised over others.

But how does it do that?

Well, the truth is, we don’t know exactly, but (similarly to increasing your SEO Ranking) marketers have worked tirelessly on an equation to help you build your organic reach.

This may sound tricky, but it’s actually really simple, so let me break it down for you.

AFFINITY

This is all to do with how much your followers interact with your page and posts: your super fans who check out your business page every day, have a higher affinity and are more likely to see your content. The more posts they view and interact with, the higher their affinity, so you want to ensure as many of your followers view and interact with your content as possible.

WEIGHT

This is all about the type of post you put out. If you post a video, that has a higher weight (in the eyes of Facebook) than an image, which in turn has higher weight than a post that contains a link, which in turn has a higher weight than content that is just text. You see where I’m going with this.

This is also about the level of interaction you receive, so the more likes, loves and lolz you get will contribute to the weight your post carries too. Different levels of interactions also hold different weights, so comments and shares and worth more than likes.

DECAY

This is all to do with when the post was made. The average lifespan of a Facebook Post is around 6 hours and most interaction (likes, comments, shares, etc.) take place in the first 2 and a half. So, unless it is a super special post, like those engagement or new baby pictures that always seem to hit the top of my news feed, after 6 hours you can pretty much guarantee that your post will no longer be seen.

Now you understand what the equation means you can begin to use different tactics within your Facebook Page to help improve your Organic Reach:

• Post Great Content: Yes, this is a lot easier said than done and takes a bit of time to work out what sort of content works for you and your arts business, but the more relevant your content is to your audience the more likely they are to interact with your posts and spend time on your page
  • + AFFINITY + WEIGHT
• Get More Page Likes: There are lots of ways you can go about this which doesn’t just involve inviting everyone from your friends list! A great way to boost page likes is to find groups and pages with similar interests to you and share some of your content to their walls; if their audience likes what they see they’re bound to throw you page a like.
  • + AFFINITY + WEIGHT
• Engage with your Audience: This can improve both your affinity and your Online Reputation Management (ORM). It helps your audience relate to your business, knowing that you are a real person who communicates with them through comments and messages. This in turn encourages them to spend more time on your content.
  • + AFFINITY + WEIGHT
• Use Facebook Stories: At only 3 years old Facebook Stories is still a growing way to share your content. I see stories as those spur of the moment posts you want to share with your audience (unlike your feed which is meticulously planned). There is still limited competition on Stories so you can use it to cut through the noise on Facebook and improve your relationship with your existing audience.
  • + AFFINITY
• Post Questions or Polls: Users are more likely to interact if you ask them a question, simple really. They feel a psychological urge to respond! The same can be said of interactive competitions too! Everyone loves free stuff so if there is a chance of it and all you need to do is share a post your audience is much more likely to engage.
  • + WEIGHT
• Post Images and Videos: And GIFs! Yes, I am still a lover of the GIF. When people are scrolling through their phones feed, they are more likely to pay attention to something that is visually stimulating.
  • + WEIGHT
• Ask your Audience: Don’t be afraid to ask people for likes and shares. This acts as a call to action for your audience for them to get all up in your content. Don’t overuse this though! Just stick it on the posts you really want to reach the most people.
  • + WEIGHT
• Plan and Schedule your Posts: This takes a little bit of trial and error: just post different content at different times of the day to start with then after a month or so, when you have built up some data, you can use Facebook Insights to figure out what times and days work for you. Then you can begin to schedule your content.
  • + DECAY

We are always happy to share posts about your Arts Business so if you want a little more traction please Tag Us on Facebook @TheArtsBiz and we’ll do our best to share it for you!

We’d also love to hear about the posts from your creative business that have done really well. Afterall, if we all shared the knowledge, we could all benefit from the rewards.

Thanks to Green Umbrella and WordTracker for the stats and some additional info that helped when writing this post.