How to beat the algorithm & increase organic reach
Many producers within the music industry are constantly complaining about how the algorithm is ruining their career due to the extremely low organic reach. Therefore, you may see people asking their fans to “turn on notifications” because of their annoyance with the algorithm. But despite all of this, many people within EDM have threatened to boycott Facebook and switch to other platforms in order to receive higher engagement rates. In this article, we’re going to talk about why you shouldn’t be bothered about the algorithm, and some techniques to increase your organic reach.
Firstly, the algorithm simply shows users content from curators that they regularly engage with. If your content is not very engaging (such as “listen to my song”), and people don’t engage with it, then it’s pretty obvious that Facebook will naturally want to reduce your organic reach because it’s not being loved by consumers. On the other hand, if your content has high engagement, there’s a probable chance of it “snowballing” and thus constantly increasing in reach.
So understandably, the content at the top of your feed won’t be in chronological order. Pages & people that you regularly engage with are constantly appearing in your news feed so that you stay on the platform for longer & feel more engaged with your experience on Facebook. The algorithm is not taking away your organic reach. Instead, it is simply optimizing the user experience for the end consumer. If your content isn’t great, then, of course, the organic reach will be low.
As an experiment, type a topic into the search bar. For this example, let’s say you write “Tomorrowland”. For 10 minutes, like & comment on every post that appears in the search feed from pages & people etc. Because Facebook sees you wanting to engage with the topic, it will start showing a lot more related posts in your feed after a few days. This could include festival videos, Tomorrowland updates etc. You get the idea.
Ultimately, Facebook & Instagram generate revenue from advertising: It’s a free platform and so you shouldn’t really be complaining that you’re not reaching enough people for free. Many people don’t read through every single email due to the vast amounts of spam from companies etc wanting to sell us products we don’t want. It’s the exact same case with the algorithm. By only displaying relevant content to each person, they spend more time on the platform (and thus see more ads).
That said, there are some amazing opportunities within the Facebook ad platform for growing your brand. For example, you can target people around the world, and grow your fanbase for as little as $0.02 per follower. Also, you can receive thousands of post engagements for as little as $2 if you are skilled with advertising (But we’ll discuss the details of this in a future article). There is essentially a supply & demand issue with Facebook & Instagram. With millions of content curators out there, the algorithm serves as a tool to filter out any irrelevant content. As an EDM producer, you’d naturally want to see useful tutorials on perfecting your craft instead of some post from a meme page you liked when you were 12. Now it should make sense.
Now that we’ve discussed why you should stop worrying about the algorithm, it’s time to go through some useful tips on boosting the organic reach of your posts as a producer. Firstly, you have to find out what resonates with your audience. Putting out content on a regular basis will allow you to view what your audience reacts well to, and thus you should make more of that. Typically, videos work extremely well if the content is good. As the audience is spending a longer duration of time viewing a post, they are spending more time on the platform. Therefore, Facebook will naturally reward you with more organic reach if the initial engagement rate is good. You should also be paying attention to the insights of the page. By understanding when your audience is most active, you can optimize your posts to reach more people. This can be done on desktop by going to Insights > Posts.
It’s certainly worth noting that Facebook will reduce the organic reach of posts with a lot of text. As this is often viewed by consumers as spammy, it is detrimental to your page if it’s something that you’re doing regularly. That said, the occasional piece of album art certainly won’t hurt. Also, it’s important to know that text statuses naturally receive less engagement. Due to their small size, it’s very easy for someone to simply scroll past it and not even notice that you wrote something. Therefore, images & videos should be the preferred content mediums if you wish to improve your organic reach. Finally, posting frequently will increase your organic reach significantly. As you are getting users to spend more time on the platform by viewing more of your posts, they will be seeing more ads in their news feed. And so like before, the algorithm will reward you with higher organic reach.
Instead of being focused on blaming the algorithm, producers should center their energy on creating engaging content so that their organic reach will increase significantly. Also with the paid product being so good, why put organic reach on a pedestal if you can reach thousands of people for just a few dollars?
