Facebook isn’t making life simple for anyone. All the drama and political posts aside, monitoring Facebook statistics nowadays can make you feel like a 90’s kid.

A lot of entrepreneurs are struggling with declining post reach and engagement that appears to shrink week-by-week, unable to identify the cause of the problems.

How do we increase our Facebook post engagement? How do we avoid paying Facebook to reach the audience?

You’re not alone. Most of the companies are finding it difficult to increase their post engagement and reach, especially after Facebook switched from Edgerank to the algorithm of machine learning.

Moreover, Facebook’s reach has fallen to 6%. That means, for every 100 followers you have, only 6 of them will see your content.

However, you can boost your reach by promoting Facebook posts. But that’s not organic. Given that the average number of Facebook users likes 70 pages, the total volume of content from the brands they follow would overcrowd their Facebook feed.

More than 20 million business pages are struggling for the attention of Facebook users. A decrease in organic reach drives those companies to invest more in post promotion and ad content.

Below image source: Average Facebook page fan engagement

Figure out the best time to post your content

Don’t just copy your competitor’s strategy and do what they do. Use their information as a point of reference and then test with your content posting strategy. Test, retest, and test some more.

One idea to try is to post in the off-hours when far more audiences are offline. When there’s not much being shared with your Facebook audience, your posts have a greater chance of jumping up in their feed and standing out.

Jon Loomer (a blogger) experimented with this theory on his Facebook page and compared posts executed during peak hours (from 6 am to 3 pm) with content executed during off-hours (10 pm to 3 am).

In every case, his posts reach was more prominent during off-hours. A potential benefit to this is that if you can boost up the engagement during off-hours overnight, your content is likely to be at the top of the news feed for the followers when they notice in the morning and start monitoring their feed.

Increase engagement by asking your fans questions

Your main goal with Facebook should be to form a community of followers that feed off one another, interact with you, share, and stay engaged. A superb strategy to achieve that is to ask users engaging questions. Don’t start with links, don’t promote anything, and avoid trying to add additional value to it.

Just ask an engaging question. Every consumer wants to be heard. Let them. Keep your questions simple and easy to understand. Remember to keep them precise to their lifestyle about your brand, and observe feedback so that you can engage with them. The more answers you get, the more powerful the reach for your post as it starts displaying up in the feed of other Facebook users.

Make sure you’re responding to comments

You might have gone to a huge amount of trouble building a fan base, sharing content, and building your brand on social media platforms. So much so that you have followers that use time from their busy day to comment on your Facebook page. Those are 100% loyal followers who are connecting with you, and they are expecting a response. Whenever you respond to their messages, it makes them feel valued and it verifies their interest in you.

Embed your Facebook posts

Facebook may be decreasing organic reach for all the users within their platform, but if you have a blog then they can’t touch your audience. This is very true if you’re raking higher a lot of traffic with your content marketing.

Enhance your reach by mixing your content marketing strategy with your Facebook content. Moreover, embedding your Facebook posts on your blog will provide a lot more visibility to the content. This is an excellent way to draw new users as well as increase your reach and engagement.

Be transparent with your brand

Transparency is the most compelling engagement tool because it gives your audience what is going on behind the scenes. In some circumstances, it can be far more educational than putting out frequent content.

Being transparent is simple and there are a few approaches:

1. Post something personal and exciting that displays the human factor behind your brand.

The best digital marketers today know that their fans want transparency. They share photos and videos that highlight them so their followers stay more connected. Sometimes your fans just want to know more about you and see you.

If you’ve understood how Facebook decides your reach, you can make a lot of money.

There’s no precise answer, which is very frustrating to entrepreneurs and marketers alike. Furthermore, the engagement and reach process is extremely complicated.

Facebook uses more than 1,00,000 distinct factors that balance into what pops up on a news feed for a Facebook user, which means trying a diverse type of content might not work, and improving your Facebook post timing might also not work.

The fact that the initial Edgerank algorithm wasn’t changed shows how it was wrapped into the new algorithm. So here are a few factors that are still important:

Affinity – Your relationship with your fans and how they engage with your brand.

Weight – Various types of content have different weights, and Facebook gives more authority to visual content.

Decay – Older posts might not show up in the feed.

Other factors to be considered are:

1. The available bandwidth of the follower

2. How the user communicates with Facebook ads

3. Types of content a Facebook user most engages with (photo, text, native video, live video, infographics, etc.)

4. What type of posts the Facebook user hides or reports as spam

Before we get into how you can enhance your organic reach without getting into Facebook advertising, let me describe a few things that you shouldn’t do:

Don’t automate

Always remember that this is a social platform and you need to give the followers some compelling content to keep them engaged. Modify your posts and the type of content you share with your followers. Make it clear that you’re not just planting out scheduled links to your blog posts.

Don’t just promote

You shouldn’t be promoting your services and products heavily. Facebook is based more on the audience’s interest, not the intent. Follow the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your posts should be social, with only 20% should be promotional.

Don’t buy

Never think about buying Facebook likes. This is a complete waste of time and money. It will cause your user engagement to fall. Furthermore, don’t spam your fans with click-bait content or with valueless updates.

You want more organic reach and engagement on Facebook.

So do I. So does everyone.

So what do you do? For beginners, keep your expectations practical. Facebook doesn’t owe anyone, and they can switch your organic reach any time they please.

You may not curate and share regular content with the users on Facebook like you could a few years ago, but you could still use Facebook to improve your brand awareness, increase your business, and create a tribe.