How to craft the perfect Facebook post so that your post is reaching more people on Facebook?

Can businesses succeed on Facebook with the decreased organic reach?

Over the past few months, I’ve read articles and updates from different sources about declines
in organic reach (how many people you can reach for free) for Facebook Pages.

Being seen on the Facebook News Feed organically has become as challenging as appearing on top of Google’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Of the thousands of stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, the News Feed displays the “best” 300.

One of the main factors that determine how News Feed chooses content is High-Quality Content. Let’s take a closer look to understand what high quality means?

Facebook leverages on machine learning system to detect content defined as high quality.

1. How timely and relevant is the post?
2. How shareable and likeable is the content?
3. Is the content genuinely interesting or is it trying to game News Feed?

To stay visible, the bottom line strategy will always be the same: produce high-quality content and optimize for engagement and reach. You can do this by focusing on these tips when creating your Page posts:

• Make your posts timely and relevant
• Build credibility and trust with your audience

By and large, it takes a lot of trial and error to understand what really makes your fans tick.  Something you think is absolutely interesting could end up with low engagement. There’s no single magic bullet for creating a high quality and viral Facebook post.

Based on the past 2.5 years of managing more than 100 Facebook pages, we have put together a basic guide to what we think makes the ‘perfect post’.

Facebook Posting Framework: The Art of The Perfect Facebook Post

Be Valuable

Informative: Useful content is king. It’s not the source of content that counts, but how interesting the content is.

Entertaining: Emotion is a key driver in why we share content; hit the sweet spot when you blend in a dose of ‘entertainment’.

Be Attractive

Appealing Visual: Pictures are worth a thousand words; they are particularly effective at grabbing attention.

Keep Things Positive: Positive posts help to create positive outcomes. Seek to build and encourage rather than to criticise and destroy.

Be Noticeable

Attention-Grabbing Title: Your headlines number-one job is to grab readers by the eyeballs and suck them into your message.

Engaging First Paragraph: Draw readers in by giving them a feel for what they can expect from reading the post.

Be Approachable

Active Voice: Use an active voice in your Facebook posts/updates, and either a positive or negative tone to trigger engagement with your audience. Be original, strike a chord with your audience, and elicit engagement.

Include a Call-To-Action: Include CTA in Facebook posts/updates and invite your target audience to engage, comment, click, like or link to your content.

Be Visible

Embrace Hashtag: Hashtag turns topics and phrases into clickable links in your Facebook posts, and helps you connect with like-minded audiences.

Schedule and Spread out: Find the best time to post your update on Facebook Insights. Widen your reach by using Facebook’s post scheduler to post at optimal timings on both weekdays and weekends.

Be Cool

Credit Your Source: Proper source attribution on Facebook is easy as pie. Just include the link to the content you cited the update from, or mention the individual or company name.

Be Likeable: Being cool is about focusing beyond yourself and recognising the good others have done and said.

Be Active

Keep Calm and Post Often: Balance various types of content. Choose your top-performing post types and include a variety of each in your updates. Post regularly but not to the extent of being spammy.

Join the Conversation On the Go: Check your page activity, view Insights and respond to fans right from your mobile device. A large portion of successful social media relies on carrying on a consistent conversation with your audience.

Be generous

Share and Give Freely: Find and share engaging and useful content if they are relevant to your audience. This builds goodwill and encourages reciprocity.

Be Authentic: Be honest with ourselves; do not claim to know things what we do not know.