How to Get More Reach on Facebook

Those of you with Facebook pages may have noticed that when you are logged in, Facebook will indicate your “organic reach” under each of your posts: it will say something like “101 people saw this post.”

According to Facebook, Organic Reach is the number of unique people, fans or non-fans, who saw any content about your Page in their News Feeds, ticker or on your Page.

So now you might be wondering, “Why is my organic reach so small? I have 600 fans, how come only 101 saw my last post?And how come some of my posts only reached 40 or 50 fans?”

Are you sitting down?

Truth is, not all your followers can see your posts in their news feeds. They can only see your posts if they visit your page (and that doesn’t happen as often as we’d like). The reason for this is Facebook uses an algorithm (sometimes called EdgeRank) to filter what your fans see in their news feed, based on what the algorithm figures is relevant to the fan. If you’re a math nerd, you can read more about EdgeRank here on Mashable.

The good news is, as followers, we don’t see a lot of junk in our news feeds that would probably not interest us anyway.

The bad news is, as content producers, we’re not reaching new audiences, because EdgeRank is only showing us to people who already like us.

So now you’re probably wondering, “How do I fool EdgeRank?” Those nerds at Facebook are pretty swift, so you know they’re always doing math stuff to keep up with people like us who ask these kinds of questions. But, that said, here are a couple of tricks…

1) Instead of posting links, post photos and include the link in your photo’s description. I first read about this scheme on Digital Inspiration.

2) Post your link in the comments section, instead of in the body of the post. So post something like “The latest on my awesome blog tells you how to mess with EdgeRank! See the link in the comments section below!” and then post the link immediately so it’s at the top of your comments section.

3) Produce amazing content that will earn you more clicks, shares, comments and likes, so your post will naturally be allowed to pass through filters. At the end of the day, content is king. Always.

Some critics believe that EdgeRank is an underhanded way for Facebook to encourage content producers to pay for services that will allow their posts to reach more people. On the other hand, it is a way to ensure that only relevant and meaningful content reaches its users… which really is the backbone of social marketing, isn’t it?

It’s a double-edged sword. What do you think?