Ever since Facebook changed its algorithm and focused on creating meaningful connections, pulling away a significant portion of advertisement and business posts from the newsfeed, the businesses that focus on community have been reaping the benefits.  The negative is that because less advertising is getting into the newsfeed, more competition exists, and cost of ads have risen. How do we fight against it?

Reach, reach, and more reach

People have called it reachmaggedon (cue in the echo sound effect), when in one day organic reach tanked for many brands.  Its because of this algorithm shift that we are in today.  Facebook looks heavier into user experience and because of that, businesses that were not experiential, inspiring, informative in an entertaining way, and adding value to their community, they lost out.  Facebook has pulled away from salesy content, so that thing we were all taught in business 101 of always have a call to action, or hard sell at the end, won’t win you any new customers on Facebook and will actually cost you a lot more in the process.  Double burn. 

The Look and Feel

We traditionally characterize Facebook communities as those who like and follow your page.  Sometimes that’s not the same thing.  A person can endorse and like your brand, but not love the content you are sharing, thus unfollowing a brand.  As people connect more on social media, less in person, and have less free time to leave their homes, there are huge opportunities to create meaningful connections throughout social media communities.  Now enter the light at the end of the tunnel. There are two pieces of a successful Facebook Community.

The Inner Community

The inner community represents all the people who like and follow your page.  Those are the people who are going to be seeing your business posts.  Get ready or the bad news.  On average only about 8% of your inner community will see your posts.  Smaller pages tend to be a higher percentage than bigger pages, but don’t feel bad if you don’t reach as many people as you think you should, its normal.  Its because people are liking more and more pages and Facebook is only allowing a person’s newsfeed to be taken up by a select number of businesses posts.  Lets build our community to reach more people. 

The Outer Community

The outer community are people who haven’t seen your content yet that are in the population that could benefit from your business and the local business community. 

The People Who Don’t Know They Are Going to Love you yet

There are people out there, right now, that would have huge value from using your product or service, but just don’t know about what you offer that could solve a problem they have.  How do we reach that person?  You reach them organically through comments and shares and paid through advertisements. 

If people comment or share your post, that post may show up in their friend’s newsfeed, if Facebook believes that it will create the potential for a great user experience with that friend.  This is a long and time-consuming process, when brands rely only on organic community building.  For all the other situations, getting to people outside of those people, is going to cost money. 

Building the Outer Business Community

There is a community of businesses around you that are waiting to be connected with.  Each Facebook Community is different from one another, sometimes having slight overlap, but in a lot of cases, there are some significant similarities.  This is an untapped market for organic growth.  If the business next door to you is having a fun community event and you highlight that community event on your Facebook Page tagging in that local business, you both win.  You expose your community to another brand, either complementary to your brand, one that your brand uses, or a local brand that you believe in, showing that you are a connected brand, and they will get their message out to people outside of their community. 

This leads into the reciprocity principle, where they are going to want to do the same for your brand in the future, getting your message out beyond your current community and doing it in a cost-effective organic way.  For me, I can’t stop raving about Treehouse Brewing Company, because, I am going to go be honest and tell you that I wasn’t a beer fan before having their Bright beer.  I have had some ok experiences with beer before, but nothing like this.  I would avoid beer in favor of fruity drinks with cool straws and umbrellas.  It’s true, just ask my friends.  My rule used to be, if the drink is pink, purple, orange, or blue colored, I am in. 

Now when conversation about beer comes up, I always have my opinion and have tagged their business on my social media multiple times before.  It doesn’t mean that they are going to share my content in the future, because they are such a big operation, but their luster may rub off on my brand now because of it.  We will dive even deeper into outer community building and successful campaign that we used in the past, in our next article on how to create a business community. Until then, use what you learned and apply it to your business today!  We look forward to see you next time!