Facebook judges each and everyone of your posts then decides how many of your friends and customers will get to see it. In this video, I’ll show you how to improve the odds that your message finds a larger audience.
To understand why some posts live and some posts die, we need to know how Facebook operates…
The average Facebook user has around 200 friends and likes roughly 100 Facebook pages. Facebook itself says the average user is exposed to 15-hundred posts each day. There’s no way you can keep up with that many updates so Facebook decides which posts you’ll see and in which order.
What happens you make a Facebook post?
Facebook starts by showing your post to a small test group of your audience. If that sample group likes, comments on, or shares your post, Facebook decides your post is interesting and pushes it to more of your followers. As long as followers keep engaging with your post, Facebook will keep pushing it to a wider audience. However, if no one engages with that initial test post, Facebook decides that it’s not interesting enough to share with a wider audience.
What’s happening here is that each time you post, you’re training Facebook to treat your posts positively or negatively. If your posts have a track record of being well received, Facebook assumes all your content will be popular and automatically starts pushing your message to larger audiences. If your content consistently fails to connect with your audience, Facebook decides that you provide low value posts and doesn’t include them in your followers’ feeds.
How can you improve your post’s engagement?
First, know that for Realtors, local content is key to getting engagement. If you live on the Sunshine Cost and you have a listing on the Sunshine Coast that you’re hoping to sell to someone else that lives on the Sunshine Coast, posting a story from Winnipeg likely won’t connect with your audience. If you want to capture a local audience’s attention, give them local stories, local images, and local videos.
Next, post something unique that your audience can’t or won’t find elsewhere. If you post a popular story that’s all over the internet, it’s more likely that your audience will ignore it as they’ve already seen it someplace else. The best way to post something unique is to create something unique. It could be a blog post you’ve uploaded to your website, it could be a fun photo you took while you were at the beach, or it could be a short video that you shot on your cell phone.
Lastly, when given the option between a text update, a photo update, or a video update, choose a video update. Facebook sees video as the future of the internet and wants to be THE place for videos to be seen and shared. It gives video posts preference over other types of content and it gives even greater weight to native video. This means a video uploaded directly to Facebook will get a larger initial audience than a link to the same video that’s posted on YouTube or Vimeo. So get in the habit of uploading your videos directly to Facebook like you would a photo.
TL;DR
If I was going to boil this video down to one short tip, it’d be this: If you want to improve your odds of being seen on Facebook, post local videos that you’ve created directly to Facebook.
Our sales pitch
I can hear you right now: “Geez Paul, I’m a busy Realtor with a family and a life and I don’t have time to spend making videos.” Well as luck would have it, I happen to be someone that has a solution to that problem.
Not only do we shoot video tours for real estate listings, we also create videos about living on the Sunshine Coast. We can write and produce a custom video specifically for you or you can license a video on one of 20 local topics and we’ll add your name and branding to said video for you to share on your Facebook page, website, and anywhere else you like.
Send me an email and ask how we can help you reach a larger Facebook audience.