Increase your Facebook post reach by doing this one thing LESS often.

You read that correctly. I have not lost my marbles and gone insane although my wife may tell a different tale… Facebook’s algorithm is designed to distribute content to users according to user habits & interests and in order to do that effectively there are 100s of factors which it takes into account to determine which post to show to whom.

It is physically impossible for you to read all the posts and updates from all your friends, business pages, bands or events you are following. Impossible, unless you manually set the notification settings for each page you want to see posts from first – however that’s a subject for another day. Today, I want to share a not so secret method to increase your Facebook post reach which will go against your better judgment, however the logic is sound and you can even put it to the test.

Are you ready for it? Do not publish a business post more than once a day. Wait what? Surely the more you publish the more you get noticed? Nah ah.

There are various reasons for this:

• You may come across as completely desperate

• You could irritate your audience by posting too much about every little detail going on at your establishment. Nobody wants to know, or cares, that you just watered the beautiful flowerpot at the front entrance – trust me on that one.

• Around 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook each day, that’s a lot of content to compete with. In order to get noticed you need to work harder on quality rather than quantity.

• Your followers may get so used to seeing your updates that they start to mentally filter out your content (you need to avoid this at all cost).

The biggest reason for not posting more than once a day is that you are putting in extra effort for not much of a pay-off. “How can that possibly be the case you crazy man?”- I hear you ask.

If, for example, you have 1000 followers and you post once a day you will reach X percentage of those followers. Factors which influence that magic percentage include Facebook’s “opinion” of the quality of the post based on how positively people are engaging with it and so on. If you publish two posts in a day, you will reach about HALF of X percentage as Facebook’s algorithm works to try and stop spamming people with just one trigger-happy organisation’s posts.

Do take note that there are certain times when publishing multiple times a day is perfectly effective and welcomed by an audience.  For example, you may see this on the day of an exciting event where followers who are unable to attend will watch the page closely for frequent updates during the course of the day. The fact that the posts are diluted in this instance does not matter as you will be reaching your biggest fans who are pro-actively going to check your page without being prompted by a post popping up in their newsfeed.  You will also continually reach those who have changed the page’s notification settings to see your posts first.
If you are using a personal profile for business and you are reading this article, then I am afraid you are out of luck as you nobody will be able to measure your marketing efforts– which is kind of the whole point of marketing in the first place.

So there you have it. Less really is more.