Over the last 18 months, organic social media has been declining. Organic reach is basically the number of people you reach for free on social media. How many of your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn followers are seeing your posts lately? Well, not as many as you might like.
According to the Digital 2022 Global Overview Report conducted by We Are Social and Hootsuite, organic reach is in decline. The findings published in this annual study give insight into trends shaping the online world, and they indicate that using the same strategy you have in the past will not yield the same results. As reported by LinkedIn, the visibility of your posts on Facebook will decrease sharply as a result of recent changes to the algorithm, and your Twitter posts will likely suffer a similar fate.
“Organic reach has been in decline as social networks increasingly enforce a pay-to-play model. Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm restricts the average visibility of non-promoted content to 5.2 percent, meaning only one in 19 people who like a page would see a particular post. The same report shows that Instagram interactions hover around the 0.96 percent mark (one in every 100 followers) while another research shared that Twitter’s is even lower at 0.045 percent.”
Julian Neo (DHS Express Malaysia writing for LinkedIn)
It seems that the strategy on many social platforms is changing into pay-to-play. But does that mean you should abandon your organic altogether? No, there are still certain things you can do to improve your organic reach. Let’s take a look at a few:
- Follow a content strategy and put some thought into your strategy, including getting to know what content your audience would like to see.
- Make quality content that will make your audience want to engage with you and share with others.
- Post at the right time using analytics tools on your social platforms to see what time the majority of your followers are online.
- Make consistency a priority by posting high-quality content regularly and at the right time to be most visible (see above).
- Get your employees on board since studies show customers will take the word of your employees over advertisers, journalists or even CEOs.
- Get to know the platform because posting content made to suit each one will help you perform better. For example, posts focusing on beautiful images and videos might perform well on Instagram, and longer, more informative pieces of text might go down better on your LinkedIn page.
- Make a connection with your followers by replying quickly to their online comments, for example, and engaging them in conversation.
Following inbound best practices will always make your organic social media perform better. But ultimately, social media platforms are heading in a direction where paid (or partial paid) will become the best way to stay competitive. Lucky for you, League Digital is a digital agency that is proficient in both, and we will be happy to share our expertise with you in developing a strategy that suits your needs.
Enjoy finding out about inbound marketing in this blog? We have more insights to share with you. Take a look at 80+ strategy-changing digital marketing statistics for 2022.
