6 Ways to Improve Organic Reach
March 8, 2019
Social media has quickly become a place where organic reach is getting more and more difficult to obtain. With so many advertising tools and marketing tricks in play, some companies no longer even attempt to get organic results.
Organic reach denotes the amount of views a social media post has without the help of outside sources; hence the term, “organic”. It’s natural, in the sense that this type of marketing metric is based purely on real human interaction. But, what can you do as a company to fight this decline and improve your organic reach? Here are 6 tips to get you moving in the right direction.
1. Take Advantage of Live Features: Nothing attracts more eyes and lets you see this measurement in person, better than the live video features on platforms like Facebook. Going live allows you to interact with customers while delivering content and recording the views you receive as you go. The best part of an online live video is that any friends or followers receive a notification every time you go live. This means even when a consumer isn’t staying until the end of a video, he or she is seeing some portion of it, and this counts toward your organic reach analytics.
Ideas for live videos include, customer reviews, Q&As, introductory posts, new product unveilings, contests and promotions and “a day in the life of” videos. You can also use live video for a demonstration or “how to”.
2. Use Bright Engaging Graphics: Live videos aren’t the only way to get consumers to sit up and take notice of a social media post. Visual aids of any kind help generate organic reach. Photographs, infographics, and memes all go a long way to spark intrigue and force “scrollers” to stop and take a look at what you’ve posted. Bright colors, unique content and interactive visuals are best for this.
Consider your own reaction when flipping through the newspaper or a magazine. A text-based add reads, “new beach umbrellas for sale”, and then a few pages later a full color spread with a beach and happy couples in bathing suits boasts, “get your umbrella before the summer fun begins.” The photograph is going to cause you to linger longer and maybe take a second glance. This is usually the case with text-only content vs. images or video content.
3. Diversify Your Newsfeeds: Social media has become a platform for cross-posting laziness. While it makes sense to occasionally share the same information from site to site, like during a product launch or big sale, regular daily content should differ a little. Having different content on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram means followers won’t skim by your brand under the assumption that they’ve already heard what you have to say for the day. If somebody reads a post about your company on LinkedIn and then switches to Facebook and sees the same, they may not bother looking for you on Facebook the next time if they’ve already seen what LinkedIn has to say.
4. Call In the Experts: Guest or influencer marketing is a hot seller for social media. Social media gurus who excel in the art of music, makeup and more are becoming celebrities in their own rite. This causes quite a stir when these individuals take part in other blogs or social media posts. Having a guest on your site will help two-fold. It makes people stop and look at your post, but it may also encourage scrolling through back-posts to see if that or any other celebrity have appeared on your site before.
Influencer marketers can also help by posting to their own social media channels about your brand. You can use these posts by sharing them from your channel, encouraging viewership for both sites. In this win-win situation, you and the guest marketer both receive new traffic. You can encourage these influencers to take part by sending a trial of your product to review on their platform.
5. Ignore the Temptation to Buy Views: It’s so easy to drop a few bucks and improve traffic, but this traffic won’t count as organic reach. If you’re using paid advertising to bring in views, you’re missing the point a little bit. Organic reach takes time and patience, so it’s no surprise that many marketers use a little bit of financial assistance from time to time to get the ball rolling. While it can be a benefit to use paid marketing for some things, too much will hinder organic traffic and have the opposite effect on your metrics.
6. Have a Plan: Just like any other marketing campaign, an organic reach campaign requires a plan. Building yourself a digital marketing map to help with this will increase success exponentially. Whether you design this plan yourself, with a team at the office, or through a third-party marketing company, it will show you where you need to go and which step to take next to get consumers to take notice naturally.
It’s important to stay true to your brand throughout your organic endeavors. One of the biggest boons or organic reach is customer and brand loyalty which comes from genuine viewers who want to see what your business has to say. It takes time to build this kind of trust and interest in your company.
Be patient and set realistic goals as you go. Having a marketing plan in place will improve your efforts and decrease time wasted on determining your next course of action.