Facebook Likes High, Reach Horrible
I've been working as a social media manager for a few years, worked for a big social media agency and everything...now I'm back to freelancing. I know my expertise are no where near those of the warriors in here, so I'm asking for help!!
So I have a client who has a pretty decent amount of likes...approx 35k. The average reach I get on a post is 1k views, 1 or 2 likes, 1 or 2 comments. Nothing. I have tried testing so many different things, like making sure to leave out any words that mention a specific city, not using links, hashes, no hashes, varying the post types, monitoring the most active times, etc. Everything. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to reach more people. I had ONE post that managed to reach 14k people the other day with 70 shares and 40 comments. It was a really shareable infographic...but still. I post funny memes relevant to the audience that would normally get the same kind of reaction as the infographic. All of the content is relevant.
It's a travel site. The audience is worldwide, the majority is in the US, west coast. But in order to drive traffic back to the site itself, I post 1, 2 or sometimes 3 pieces of site content a day (all totally different types of content...a blog post, a forum discussion, and a review for example, and all different post types as well...I always switch it up), and then some engagement stuff as well.
Our "sort of" competitors have around 300k likes and average shares in the hundreds. I know they have a lot more likes than we do....but my client swears that we should be getting way more reach and doesn't understand why we are only getting seen by 1k people if we have 30k likes.
So first I thought it was maybe our likers werent following us and so we werent showing up in their news feed. But when I went to investigate I saw that when you like a page, you automatically follow it (is this somewhat new? I thought in the past you had to manually select this option.)
The highest performing content is text only posts, with links and also just engagement questions. But it's still not a lot. The only other thing I could think of was that the page was really crappily managed before me...it was started in 2009 and I just started working on it in December. My clients are pressuring me every day to get more engagement and drive more traffic to their site....but I am stumped as to why nothing is working. Twitter is doing great...but fb I have no idea what is going on.
Is anyone else having this issue with extremely low reach? I think fb is penalizing the page for being crappy for so long, and it sees that we have somewhat of a decent amount of likes, so we must have $$ to spend on boosting posts, so its trying to force us into that direction (sounds crazy I know). I just want to show up in more feeds. And I know my content isnt horrible, and that it's shareable and that I'm doing things and voicing things in a way to engage with the viewers. Ive worked on many big client accounts before and never had this kind of issue before. My content was always performing pretty well. Right now my client is discussing doing some kind of paid post to tell everyone to turn on notifications for the page...but I told them that would risk people unliking the page altogether when they got annoyed with it.
Bottom line is I will lose this client soon if I don't change something quickly. Any suggestions or thoughts? Similar stories?
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