How to optimize your Facebook reach

Social media like Facebook allow you to reach people that might be interested in your stuff. You’ll reach people who like your Facebook page, and you might even reach the friends of people who like your Facebook page. Some posts, however, seem to be much more successful than others. Why do some of your posts on Facebook get many likes, shares and comments, while others are largely ignored by your audience? In this post, I’ll help you optimize your Facebook reach.

If you want to learn more about using social media and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-Around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it’ll help you put these skills into practice!

Best practices for increasing Facebook reach

If you want tips to be successful on Facebook make sure to read a blog post. He analyzed Facebook posts and his tips are really helpful to start optimizing your own Facebook page. Although we can learn a lot from his best practices, it’s very important to remember that your Facebook page and your audience are unique.

As you are trying out his tips, I would strongly advise you to analyze the reach and the engagement of your own Facebook posts. What posts does your audience like? Which posts reached a lot of people? And which posts were hardly noticed? What seems to work on your own Facebook page? And what can you learn from that? Also, make sure to check out these new tactics to improve your Facebook reach.

Start analyzing regularly

Want to be able to predict which posts will increase your reach and engagement on Facebook? Start by checking out the Insights tabs on your Facebook page. And make sure to check out these stats regularly.

Look into the reach of each post (the number of people the post was served to) and the number of likes, shares and comments. If you do this on a regular basis, you’ll begin to notice patterns.

Read more about Facebook Insights in Michiel’s post!

Important aspects to consider

Whether or not a post is successful on Facebook could be caused by countless things: the length of the post, the topic of the post, the day of the week. But it could also be caused by world events, the weather or by pure chance. You won’t be able to fully control or predict your success. However, analyzing aspects of previous posts should give you some clues about what works for your audience (and what doesn’t).

Time and day of your post

The timing of your post matters. For some time slots (like at night) competition will be low. For other time slots your audience will be more available and engaged, but there’ll also be more competition. It’s a matter of testing which day and time will be most effective. For Yoast, weekdays are much better than the weekend. This will definitely depend on your audience.

Topic of the post

You’re most likely blogging about various topics and your audience will like some of them more than others. Check what posts do well with your audience; what topics are the most successful? Try writing more posts about those topics. Additionally, you could try to make your other posts look a bit more like the ones that are successful.

Purpose of the post

Closely analyze the purpose of your post. Did you write this post to inform your readers, or to entertain them? Or, were you trying to sell your stuff? For Yoast, more “salesy” posts seem to get far less reach and engagements. Posts in which we announce a sale or introduce a new product seem to be the least successful ones in our timeline.

Illustrations or videos?

Make sure to study the reach and engagements of posts with different kinds of illustrations, photos and videos too. Do posts with illustrations differ in their reach compared to posts without illustrations? Do posts with video get more likes or shares compared to the ones without?

Be realistic with your time

If you want to share more on social, but don’t always have the time to write a social post from scratch, an automated publishing flow can be the answer. At the same time, you don’t want to compromise on the quality of your social posts. Luckily, you can set up exactly how these posts should look. After creating your automated publication flow, your content will be shared on a platform of your choice every time you publish a post.

Conclusion

To really understand what a successful Facebook post looks like, you really have to dive into your Facebook Insights. We’re currently taking our analysis a step further by doing an extensive research on what works on the Facebook page of Yoast.

For all of you, the ability to predict which posts are going to be successful on Facebook will also be very valuable. So go ahead and check out your Facebook Insights and start analyzing your posts!

Read more: Facebook Page Insights explained »

Coming up next!


8 Responses to How to optimize your Facebook reach

  1. Laura
    Laura  • 9 years ago

    Thanks for a great article! For our Facebook page we’ve found we get most interaction from shared content especially early in the morning from 7-9am! Similar to yourselves we also find ‘sales’ posts receive little or no interaction with the average reach being around 60 people out of 1,769!

  2. Kenny
    Kenny  • 9 years ago

    You gave really great advice I hope other people reading this listen to it.

  3. sevenlittlewords
    sevenlittlewords  • 9 years ago

    Nice tips. Well, you are right. I think I need to try to experimenting a bit. I mean the time of my posts in social media usually at random. I will try to experiment on the “time” to see when is the “best” time. Thaks for the tips!

  4. Bryan
    Bryan  • 9 years ago

    So it’s best to post (like at night) when there’s less competition but that means less people browsing too right? I’ll give this a try and see how it goes as we usually do postings during busy times. Thanks Yoast!

  5. Russell Collins
    Russell Collins  • 9 years ago

    Probably a little off topic but here goes. I’m new to Yoast and find it very informative, I’ve bought the books and maybe one day get a web site review. I appreciate the blog and comments.

    How long does the post comment facility on a blog entry remain open please as I had a question related to an entry posted last September and the Reply feature has now been disabled.

    Many thanks.

  6. MArlin Doe
    MArlin Doe  • 9 years ago

    I agree with the fact that every social media help us to increase our reach to our audience but still sometimes the resultants are not that effective. Our expectations are not full filled..but the factors you have provided are just perfect!! I will try these definitely!! Thank you for sharing it..

  7. Andreas Ostheimer
    Andreas Ostheimer  • 9 years ago

    Thanks for this post and the linked blog post by Neil Patel is GOLD.

  8. ihtisham
    ihtisham  • 9 years ago

    Thank you Yoast <3