5 Honest Truths About Facebook, You Wish You Would’ve Known Earlier

Multi-ethnic businesswomen whispering and making faces while colleagues eavesdrop.

There are so many truths about Facebook that can help you better understand it, but today we are addressing five truths that our clients are always asking us about when posting to Facebook organically. Posting to Facebook organically means you are not spending any money boosting your posts or placing ads. A lot of Nonprofits don't always have the money or resources to put into Facebook advertising.  There are 2.6 billion monthly active users on the app, and only 4% of organic posts are seen a month. Today, we are going to tell our five truths about Facebook to help your Nonprofit work towards that 4%.

If you are posting more on any social media more than once a day, you need to stop immediately. You're even pushing it if you're posting every day. You may be scratching your head because when it came to social media advertising only two years ago, we were all taught post as much as you can. That's not the case anymore. Facebook's Algorithm is always changing. Currently, if you are posting at a high frequency, Facebook will essentially put you at the bottom of the newsfeed because they have millions of other accounts to accommodate. Facebook has become a huge hub for advertising with businesses. They simply cannot show your organization who is posting everyday on newsfeeds everyday because everybody needs their turn.

Whether it is the first time you have posted ever, or the first time you have posted in a while, that post, will see a high number of ‘reach.' You're going to feel so optimistic about all you can do on Facebook, just for your post three days later to get a low ‘reach.' While, I don't have a definitive answer, I do have a guess. Facebook wants to show you what your potential could be, to lure you into buying ads with them. As we know, Nonprofits don't always have that budget to spend on ads. Stay tuned, we have some suggestions!

If you are posting content on Facebook that drives people off Facebook, your post will not see much success. For example, let's say you are hosting a toy drive for your local animal shelter. You post a link to your website for people to sign up, or you post a video on with a link to Youtube for people to see your promo pieces. Facebook basically blocks this because it takes people away from Facebook.

What does this mean? If you are liking or commenting back to comments on your post, or creating polls, Facebook will give you a little bump in the newsfeed ranking. Again, I don't know for sure, but my theory is you are keeping people on the App longer. You may get into banter, or they will spend time reading your comments, reading your poll and casting their vote, so that increases their in-app time and keeps them coming back for more.

This one may be the harshest truth, and that's why we saved it for last. The way Facebook is currently set up, the only way to really have your page discovered is to put money into your posts. We alluded to this earlier, but because there are millions of businesses on Facebook, Facebook has to honor those who are paying before those who are not. Which, in most cases inclines the user to put some money into their Facebook account if they are using Facebook as their main marketing source or just have the ability to spend that money. Working with Nonprofits, we know this isn't always doable. So, what can you do?

How to work Facebook without paying:

  1. In your email marketing, link your Facebook posts in the email. If you had a great event, but not a lot of people saw the post, there is no harm in saying “in case you missed it, check out our toy drive here.” This gets people to your page.
  2. Create content that draws engagement. Create posts with questions, calls to action, stats about your organization's impact. We suggest always using a picture.
  3. Post a video directly to Facebook (not a link to Youtube) that is two minutes long at least once a month. This will increase the viewer's likelihood of staying on the page.
  4. Take the frequency of your posting down, and use that time to interact with followers. If you don't have a lot of comments and followers to interact with, take that time and like other pages with your Nonprofit's account. You can comment on other organization's posts because that gives your Nonprofit exposure.
  5. THE most important thing to do in order to work Facebook is to keep up with the latest algorithms. Facebook always tests new tools on personal pages before they go to business pages. Be sure to pay attention.

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