How Bored Panda, REI, and Vox Increase Organic Reach

Organic reach - natural reach: is the number of people, both fans and non-fans, who see your post.

In 2013, a Facebook page could easily reach about 12% of fans with a single post.

Is that the end of Organic Reach on social media?

I don't think so.

Although organic reach on social media has decreased over the years, I am optimistic that we can still maintain it.

How?

How to (still) achieve organic reach on social media

1. Understand and keep up to date with social media algorithms

Organic reach on social media depends on its algorithms.

The algorithm is always changing and improving to ensure that users see what they want to see the most.

So how does each social media algorithm work?

Facebook algorithm

Facebook's algorithm includes four main components responsible for setting the content people see in News Feed: inventory (the 'empty spaces' on a website where ads can be placed), signals, predictions and relevance scores.

In our in-depth analysis of how Facebook News Feed 2018 works, we realized that signals are what marketers and brands can focus on to increase organic reach.

You can get higher organic reach by posting content that is relevant to your target audience or creating meaningful interactions organically (e.g. Facebook Live), or by building a niche community through a Facebook Group.

Instagram algorithm

Instagram recently revealed three key factors that determine the posts users see in their Instagram feed:

• Interest: Posts that Instagram thinks a person might be interested in will appear higher in the feed.
• Timeliness: New posts will tend to appear higher in the feed.
• Relationship: Posts from frequently engaged accounts will also tend to appear higher in the feed.

There are also three other factors that contribute to the ranking of Instagram posts, but to a smaller extent:

• Frequency: Instagram aims to show the best posts since the last visit.
• Follow: If you follow multiple accounts on Instagram, Instagram will try to show posts from multiple accounts rather than posts from a few accounts.
• Usage: Instagram tries to show the best posts first.

Twitter algorithm

The Twitter timeline is mostly reverse chronological, it also uses an algorithm to show individual tweets it thinks you might be interested in.

• The tweet itself: recency, presence of media tags (images or videos), and overall engagement (including retweets, clicks, favorite videos, and reading time)
• Author of the tweet: past interactions with this author, the strength of the connection, and the origin of the relationship.
• Friend: tweets you've been interested in in the past, frequency and level of Twitter usage

Once given a relevance score, tweets are categorized into one of three sections on the timeline:

• “Ranked tweets” (recent related tweets)
• “In case you missed it” (older related tweet)
• The remaining tweets are in reverse chronological order

2. Fewer but better posts

“I can't compete with the giants, so I have to post less but do better,” Bored Panda founder Tomas Banišauskas.

In 2016, an average of 17 million people visited Bored Panda each month.

Fewer but better posts.

Even though competitors were hacking the Facebook algorithm, using clickbait, and growing their Facebook pages and websites, Banišauskas decided against that strategy.

According to NewsWhip, this made the Bored Panda Facebook page the most engaged Facebook page last October.

Using a similar “less but better” strategy, we managed to triple Facebook visits in 2017.

When we realized that our 100+ posts were reaching less than 2% of our Facebook fans, we cut our posting frequency by more than half and really just focused on sharing the best content we could find or create.

If you want to implement this strategy, here are a few things you can try:

• Experiment with posting only one or two pieces of content per day
• Post only the best content you can find every day
• Never do clickbait

3. Select and edit user-generated content

From 2015 to 2016, our social media manager Brian Peters grew his Instagram following from 4,250 to over 21,000.

His secret?- User generated content.

The easiest way to think about user-generated content is: “brands leverage the best user content on the web and showcase it on their own social media or other platforms and pay for it,” says Brian.

This is the same strategy used by brands like REI, Birchbox, and Fedex.

Start hosting photo contests where customers can submit photos of your brand (or share them with your brand hashtag) to win prizes.

It can take a few weeks or even months of entering photo contests to build trend strength and get enough photos to repost.

You should contact the author to request permission to repost their photos to your profile before reposting them.

When resharing your photos, you should also clearly state information about the author.

• Photo: @username
• Regram: @username
• ?: @username

4. Invest in groups

Imagine fans not only liking your posts, but proactively posting constructive thoughts and engaging in discussions on topics surrounding your brand?

That's what Vox did with their Weeds Facebook Group.

There has been a general trend towards being more relevant and active on Facebook- the largest social media network to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”.

And social media groups can become the leading channel for organic reach.

While it's uncertain whether Facebook Groups will increase organic reach, there is good evidence that they boost social media engagement.

P.s Here's another quick tip: Observe the news distribution and publishers' actions on social media.

5. Test new social media networks

Have you heard about Musically?

If you haven't, you, like me, haven't done your research before and we're not the only ones.

Besides the Big Six (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat), there are many emerging social media networks that are attracting attention around the world.

For example, Coca-Cola became the first brand to join the Musically platform when it launched a social media campaign.

Over the past year, we've also had some success sharing our blog posts to Flipboard.

All of this is not to say that you should create an account for your brand on Tik Tok or Flipboard right away.

• Vero – a free social media app and chronology
• Tik Tok (Douyin) – music video and social network platform
• Amino App – a network of unique communities
• Anchor – an audio social network and content distribution system about short audio tracks
• Flipboard – news aggregator and social network
• Medium – online publishing network

How to get organic reach?

I believe it is not the end of organic reach on social media (and I also realize I may be biased!) Many brands and organizations, such as publishers, are closely monitoring changes in social media and the emergence of new social media to adapt and increase organic reach.

So what are you doing to receive organic reach on social media and specifically your fanpage?