In a nutshell, here’s what you need to know:

High reach + Low engagement = your next post will be throttled significantly.

Low reach + High engagement = your next post will receive significantly higher reach.

Of course there’s more to it than that but if you pay attention to the rules above you’ll benefit. One good trick is to post a ‘crowd pleasing’ status update which you KNOW will achieve a high level of engagement and then follow it up the next day with a message of a more promotional nature. But keep in mind the one after that will be back down to low reach.

Better still is to figure out a way of making the promotional messages more engaging and interesting so that people do interact with them. Look at it as Facebook doing you a favour – it chooses to display your message to 200 people through its news feed. Of the 200 who saw it, only 3 were interested enough to click the LIKE button. And no-one wrote a comment.

So Facebook penalises you. You’ve blown an opportunity and the next thing you say is going to rank much lower.

Asking people to visit your page gets round this of course and if they subscribe to ‘notifications’ they’ll see everything you post. And people who have previously LIKED or commented on your posts will be more likely to see what you say in future.

Facebook works very hard to protect its news feed from spam. It needs to be useful and interesting to each individual user, otherwise they’ll stop using it. So if you’re a business with more than 500 LIKES (which seems to be a key number for Facebook) and little in the way of engagement, then Facebook doesn’t want you to gain more LIKES, it wants you to post more engaging updates and it’ll keep penalising you until you do so.

If someone you know is interested in establishing a social media plan and understanding how to communicate as a business in a more engaging way, then tell them about our social media masterclass in Hillington, Glasgow on March 15th. There are a few spaces left but once this sells out we’ll soon add another date.