A little known trick to extend your Facebook fan numbers for FREE!

Plus how one post got a reach of over 400%

There's not a lot that Facebook offers brands for free any more but here's a little known technique that might just net you a few new fans without having to shell out any advertising spend.

Most reasonably popular posts on a brand's Facebook Page end up surfacing occasionally on the newsfeed of non fans - normally in the form of a notification that a friend has liked or commented on the post. With a really popular post you'll often find a domino effect whereby you pick up Likes to the post from the non fan too. What a fantastic opportunity to convert to fandom. But how to do it?

It's actually pretty simple. Take the post below. Now we have just over 10,500 fans on the Musicademy Facebook Page but I'd picked up on a news story that I knew would appeal big time to our audience and sure enough, within a few days of posting the video piece we'd reached 43,500 people. Yep that's ORGANIC REACH of 412%.  Eat your heart out Facebook Page Admins. I share some background on all that towards the end of this post.

So the first thing you want to do is see where all those Likes came from. Simply hit the hypertext link on the number of Likes as shown below by the big red arrow:

Facebook will then show you something like this:

You'll see people who already Like your Page (Jane Featherstone above), other brand Pages that Liked the post (the Leger des Heils Spikenisse Page shown above). You'll see people who have their privacy settings set really high (Sherena Sista Shez Lawrence) and a bunch of people who Liked the Post but aren't currently a fan (Helen Cockeram). Facebook lets you now invite those people to Like your Page in a message that it will surface in their newsfeed. Simply hit "Invite" and Facebook does the rest. For free.

You can even go back and do this through previous posts although I'd suggest doing it regularly to very recent posts while your brand has a chance of being in the mind of the potential fan.

What was the secret to the huge organic reach?

There were a few factors going on here. I'll summarise the key ones.

• We posted this very early on in the campaign so we were one of the first to newsfeed with this video/information
• The piece had huge viral potential due to the subject matter overlap with the passions of our fan base and many of their friends
• It was a native Facebook video (rather than a YouTube link) so got lots of natural organic reach
• It was very newsworthy - likely a trending topic that day. Facebook likes newsworthy trending stuff
• The post got lots of instant likes and shares which sent Facebook all the right signals about it being a piece of quality content

Let's geek out on the data

I'm constantly fascinated by the ever-changing Facebook algorithm. At the time of writing this article the stats on the Facebook post were as follows:

• 10,577 total fans
• 43,552 people reached by post (412%)
• 2,832 actual fans who saw the post (26.8%) (column T on the Data Export Sheet). THIS IS AN IMPORTANT NUMBER TO NOTE. Only 26.8% of our fan base saw what was in fact our most viral post of the year. The rest was VIRAL REACH
• 39 - total number of people who gave negative feedback to the post

You can't tell what your viral reach is without downloading your Insights data as a csv file and doing some calculations. I share how to do this every time I do any live training as I think it's an essential metric for Page owners to be aware of.

Video data. Facebook now allows you to download the metrics on video viewing (go to Insights and Export or simply hit the Post info on the dashboard). Here are the key stats for this post:

• 94,111 - total number of impressions of page post
• 11,803 - number of unique people who viewed the video for more than 3 seconds
• 4,196 - number of times the video was viewed (uniques) for 30 seconds or to the end

Liking these tips? Wanting to hear some more?

There are loads of tips like these that the majority of Facebook Admins are simply unaware of. Marie covers many of them in her  “Deep Dive” days on Facebook Marketing and the other social networks. Along with colleagues from her consultancy, The Digiterati, she is running a number of these throughout 2016 both live in London and Manchester and also as extended webinars. She would love for you to join her! Click to register to receive updates (and coupon codes) as dates are announced.