How to boost the reach of your organic social media

Relying on your organic social media posts to do the business is increasingly tough - the social media giants want your money and, as a result, anything you don't pay to promote might suffer.

But, you *can* still work some magic with organic! In fact, there are a few things you can do right away that are likely to give your posts a boost. Keep scrolling to see what they are.

Prioritise quality over quantity

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to simply push *loads* of organic content out there to increase your chances of being seen. It’s actually far, far better to think in terms of quality of content over quantity of content.

Take Facebook, for instance – you’ll get much better results with two or three really great posts a week compared to five or six average ones.

Your content needs to make people react in a way that will prompt them to interact with it in some way - share it, comment on it or like it. That means you're aiming for 'wow' or 'cool' rather than 'meh'.

This is all down to the algorithm – your challenge, as content creators, is to post something that will make your audiences react in some way (a like, comment, share etc) every time you post something. If they do, the algorithms will keep serving your content because you’ll be giving your audiences something they like.

On that subject…

Understand what your audiences wants

Your organic content needs to be relevant, interesting, engaging and entertaining to your audience. And, spoiler alert, that might not necessarily be your organisation’s latest press release that someone, somewhere is telling you to get on social media.

Spend time looking at the analytics for your accounts, understand what sort of content works well with your audience and build that insight into your content planning. And, challenge yourself before you push ‘post’. Will your audience genuinely care about this content? Do you care about this content? If not…rework it.

Define who your key audiences are

This is really important, and you should do it for every social media channel you use. Don’t simply post everything everywhere – instead, really scratch away the surface and understand what channels will work best for each of your audiences. Chances are your Instagram following and your LinkedIn following will be wildly different, so your content plans should reflect that.

Think visually

An easy one this, but all the social channels love images and videos. So, think about how you can make the most of them. A picture is worth 1,000 words and all that...

Pay attention to new toys

Remember when Facebook Live launched and got a massive boost in the algorithm? As social media managers, you need to stay on top of new toys and new features offered by social networks and be prepared to use them early on.

Even if you only get the boost for that new feature’s honeymoon period, you’ll still likely get a boost in the algorithm…so it’s definitely worth it.

Post regularly

Don’t confuse this with posting *all the time*, but you should be posting regularly on social media – otherwise there’s no point in you being there.

Here’s a rough guide to how you might like to approach each channel…

Facebook: 3-5 times a week
Instagram: once a day, plus Stories
Twitter: 5-10 times per day, including some retweets
LinkedIn: 3-5 times a week, posting first thing in the morning

Use Instagram Stories

If you’re not using Stories, you’re definitely missing out. For boosting your organic reach, it’s an absolute no-brainer.

Incorporate UGC

Lastly, please ensure you’ve got a plan for finding and using user-generated content in your organic social media. Identify what hashtags your audiences are using when posting about you, search those tags and engage with the content on there. Even better, reach out to people and ask if you can share their posts on your own channel, with a credit of course.

Not only that, create hashtag campaigns for people to get involved with and, even better, let members of your audience take over your channels. You’ll love UGC, your audience will love UGC and the algorithms love UGC…it’s a win-win!

A version of this article originally appeared on The Native last year