Building a Facebook following is challenging for most business owners and many rarely reach the thousand or so page followers needed to build organic momentum. Exploiting your customer touch-points begging them to follow your page at every opportunity is often the only strategy business owners use and whilst this has its value, it only reaches those who are buying your goods and services.

It is important to look beyond the people presently in your reach and build an audience of prospects or people who know people in your target market and may potentially recommend you.

​Here is just one strategy within Facebook that enables you to broaden your following. 

From time to time a Facebook user who is not a follower of your page may like or react to your post. Often this occurs because a follower has shared your post enabling it to be displayed in the news feeds of their friends.
This presents an opportunity for you to grow your page audience by inviting them to follow your page.

You can monitor the reactions to your post from your business page by clicking on the reactions icon. This will open a popup showing those who have liked or reacted to the post and those that have liked your page.  From here you can invite  non-followers by clicking on the invite button.

This is an under-utilised strategy that you can implement immediately with absolutely no cost to grow your Facebook page following.

P.S. It can also be useful to acknowledge those who engage with your posts by thanking them or replying to their comments.

Ant Ulijn is a social media specialist at emanation and can help you be relevant to your audience.

Organic reach on social media is becoming harder and harder for business owners to achieve as social media platforms prioritise content from direct personal connections in news feeds and push businesses into the paid advertising space.These platforms after all are only free for users because they build enormous data sets which they monetise through targeted advertising which can be advantageous to business owners using the pay to play space.

For those without unlimited budgets, organic social media posting does still have an impact and being effective means sharing original content that users find interesting. Now in spite of the amazing developments in AI, platform algorithms rely on signals such as engagement to decide if content is interesting and sharing your own content can get the ball rolling.

When your business shares a post it creates the opportunity for the post to be seen by followers of the page. Actual reach is determined by the platforms algorithm which considers a followers location, interests, previous engagement with the page and a number of other things.

When your page followers react, comment and/or share your page's post they tell the platform that your content is of interest which increases the possible reach of your post.
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Sharing your own page's posts may seem like vanity to the uneducated, however; when you share your page's posts you initiate the process of sharing your content beyond your page's followers. You create the opportunity for the posts to be seen by your friends and direct connections and for their engagement to increase your post's potential reach even further.

Ant Ulijn is a social media specialist at emanation and can help you be relevant to your audience.