What is organic reach?

The fuel that propels the online marketing machine is traffic and in today’s social media era, online forums, particularly Facebook, have surpassed traditional search engines as a way to reach an expanding and targeted audience. As found by Parse.ly, 46% of referral traffic is generated from social media with Facebook contributing a whopping 41.2%. In this way, businesses, their online branding and the ability of these businesses to reach new audiences and potential clients organically via social media is a key strategy to generate new clientele quickly and efficiently.

Organic Reach - What is it?

Organic reach is a metric in social media marketing that calculates the number of people who have seen your post through unpaid distribution. In other words, the number of eyes that have seen the post once.

Organic reach does not include content that has been promoted by paid tools (paid social media advertisements) to boost the post’s visibility. Thus, the key benefit of promoting your organic reach is to optimise your brand presence for free.

Why is organic reach important?

Firstly and most importantly because it’s FREE and saves you money 

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Organic reach allows businesses to nurture more leads and encourage conversions. Whether your business sells a product or a service, the ability to become visible to an online audience has the potential to expand your business exponentially compared to face-to-face interaction or even traditional advertisement.

The effectiveness of organic reach also helps to rationalise costs spent on paid promotion. If organic reach is effective and extends the impact of advertisements, businesses are able to keep the overall cost of advertisement low or justify cost per click.

How to optimise your organic reach 

How do you work around these constraints to maintain or improve your online visibility? You can improve the potential engagement rate of a post by:

1. Considering the platform and the audience on that platform
The audience on Facebook is not the same as the audience on LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube etc. Each platform has different eyes, different expectations and different guidelines required to maximise the reach of an organic post.

2. Building your presence and authority
The main component of building the integrity of your brand would be to avoid post automisation. Organic reach is built on interest not intent, so taking the extra time to post content relevant to your audience, current events or personalise your posts not only humanises your brand but creates more engaging content.

3. Be intentional about your target audience
Although having a large following is encouraging, a random fan base is not useful. They fail to engage, will not build up your brand integrity and are unlikely to convert into sales. Being consistent in your online engagement and reinforcing your message through posts, content and participation that is conducive to your brand mission will cultivate a strong audience likely to promote your brand within their own circles of influence. Remember: if your presence is diluted your audience is likely to be also.

4. Incorporate avenues for engagement
The scale of your following undoubtedly impacts the reach of your posts. But one of the main ways you can maximise your organic reach is to offer integrative elements to your page. The use of hashtags, integrations and customisations including podcasts, quizzes, polls and blogs is a clever and easy way to gather information about your audience whilst encouraging them to engage with your brand.

5. Cross promote!
The simplest yet most neglected tool to optimise your organic reach across platforms is cross promotion. Sharing the post to your stories, snapchats, LinkedIn profiles or websites is an invaluable way of promoting greater interaction and ensuring you are promoting your online visibility as much as possible.

Are organic campaigns always effective?

NO. The organic reach of a platform varies significantly depending on the amount of paid inventory present on the platform.

A great example of this is Facebook. A normal everyday post was seen my many many more eyes 5 years ago on the Facebook platform than it is today. In fact, some posts are barely get any traction at all.

Organic reach on Facebook is clearly in decline, with stats showing that it fell by 52% in 2016. This is due to 3 simple reasons:

1. Paid inventory (Facebook Advertising) is increasing and will take priority over unpaid inventory.

2. There is simply more content than there is news space (paid and organic). With roughly 30 billion news pieces on Facebook alone the amount of content is far more than a newsfeed allows or is consumable by any one individual.

3. Facebook now tailors content present on newsfeeds to individual user preferences limiting what they receive to optimise their experience on the site.

Other platforms currently have a much better organic outcome but this continues to change as media evolves.

This is why we stay on top of your social environment and optimise the time you put into creating content. This alone could save you thousands in the long run.