More and more these days, leaders are finding themselves utilizing social media, and especially facebook and twitter to impact people, and train other leaders.
Michael Hyatt has said, “[Leaders] have to see the use of social media as an integral part of your job. It has to be a tool that enables you to accomplish your work—your real work—more effectively and more efficiently.”
But aside from making time for social media, leaders often find themselves at a loss of how to utilize the technology effectively.
Adding to this, facebook has now begun to cut back the “organic reach” of posts, and some pages find themselves struggling to reach their followers, and at a loss of what to do.
Growing in your knowledge of how to use various platforms for the sake of your leadership is important, and small steps can help you increase your influence and engagement, helping your overall leadership impact tremendously.
Here are 8 simple, proven steps any leader can take to triple your facebook reach and impact:
1. Don’t auto-feed from twitter or other platforms – facebook often sees other sites as competitors, thus why it cuts down organic reach on posts coming from twitter and other platforms or scheduling sites.
2. Take out the @ sign – if you are scheduling to both facebook and twitter at once through scheduling sites like Hootsuite or Buffer, be sure to take a quick minute to clean up the post for facebook. @ symbols and other twitter specific content will affect your organic reach, and confuse a lot of people on facebook who don’t understand twitter.
3. Remove double links – Once the embedded link pops up on facebook, take out the original link in the text. Double links lower your organic reach.
4. Post natively – Facebook bumps posts scheduled through the native facebook scheduler. It is best to schedule posts directly on facebook, and this will help your organic reach. I schedule facebook posts through facebook, and twitter posts through Hootsuite.
5. Don’t post YouTube videos – Upload video files directly to facebook. This will do ten times as much organic reach as posting YouTube video links, because facebook wants to bolster their platform as a video site.
6. Space your post – If you are quoting a person or Scripture, space down and put the person’s name below. This will give you a bit more real estate in the facebook news feed, and clean up the post for ease of reading, which helps engagement (likes, comments) and boosts your organic reach.
7. Clarify what you are trying to say – Often, small tweaks in the phrasing or wording of your post will help. Can you state what you are saying in less words? All theses small tweaks help the ease of your followers quickly reading and liking the post, which greatly affects organic reach. Think – you only have seconds with people sometimes as they scroll down, so if you are unclear, or saying more than you need to, you give them a split-second reason to move on. The more people engage with your post, the more facebook increases organic reach.
8. Is your content compelling enough? – Ask yourself for each post: is this worth putting on social media? The content that does best is easy to understand and content that people would easily agree with. For example – don’t simply put the title of your article – pull the most powerful quote you can find from the article, and use that as the text for the post. Nothing beats compelling content!
Matt Brown is an evangelist, author of Awakening, and founder of Think Eternity
