I’ve got some very exciting news and it’s that organic reach on Facebook is back for businesses. It’s not something that we’ve had for many many years and it’s a really big deal for Facebook marketers
I first got involved in Facebook advertising in 2008 when I was working at a radio station. I wanted to promote my radio show and the little sidebar ads were the one single way you could do it and get people to like your radio station or radio show page. And it worked really well. It let me then go and get lots of interaction on my show page.
Fast forward to 2023, and pretty much no one is seeing your Facebook business page posts – so buying ads to get people to follow your page is kind of pointless.
When that happened Facebook advertisers obviously adjusted. We changed from trying to get those Facebook page likes and then being able to Market to them on an ongoing basis for free… to running things like conversion campaigns to directly get purchases from our ads and relying solely on our ads to generate those conversions to get the lead to get the sales. That’s as opposed to trying to follow up with them on an ongoing basis. If we did want to follow up with people that we’d already advertised to once, we would simply advertise again.
More money, right?
But all that is now changing with Facebook reels. Relatively recently Facebook added reels much like they did with Instagram and people are getting organic reach again… significant organic reach via Facebook reels.
I’ve seen it across a bunch of marketers I know – and I ran a test myself and voila! Where my video would normally get about 100 views on the regular feed, on Facebook Reels, it got well over 1000.
I think it means a few things for us as businesses on Facebook.
Firstly there’s going to be more value in acquiring followers now
Facebook page like campaigns are now relevant again.
What you need to do is what I call priming your Facebook page. If you’re going to be running conversion campaigns on Facebook to get sales, let’s say you want to make sure that your page doesn’t look empty and you look like a legitimate business, you want to have some followers and have a bit of Engagement going on.
So I recommend that your Prime your page purely for appearance’s sake.
You want this so that when people see your ads for your products or services and people come through and check you out at your page and you look like a legit business with engagement and followers that you’ve gathered from running a followers campaign to get more people on your page and then Reels to get more engagement from those new and old followers.
This makes you look like a business people want to work with. However, in addition to that benefit, you can post reels via your Facebook page and get significant engagement on those reels which we know can be really valuable in terms of converting those people into customers… this is something that you’re normally going to have to pay for.
With one client who we ran a Page Likes ad campaign alongside daily Reels posts to their Page, we saw an increase Reels viewings from ~30 per post to over 1000 per post per day, consistently over a month. The end result was a 27% increase in new page followers, but more importantly the conversions increased dramatically. This client generally books one new client per week at most. After this campaign, she is booked out for the next two months.
Client Facebook campaign, Febraury 2023
So in terms of whether you should be running Facebook page like or Facebook page follower campaigns… yes should you be doing more of it now than I would have recommended a year ago, or two years ago.
This is still pretty new but if this continues that’s definitely something that I’m going to be recommending. So the value of your new followers is going up which is great. it also means that your regular Facebook advertising campaigns come with an added benefit when you’re running conversion campaigns to generate leads to generate sales.
Even better – if you already have a big follower base, then it’s time to start making those Reels and getting the engagement you’ve been wanting all these years.