I hear a lot of myths repeated about Facebook traffic that I want to clear up.
Most of these myths can be debunked quite readily, and it’s important to do so as they might be holding you back from getting the most traffic and optimal revenue from your organic Facebook visitors!
Right, let’s take a dive into the 4 most common myths I hear about Facebook traffic.
Myth #1: You need millions of page followers to generate good traffic or engagement
This is probably the most frequent thing I hear from people about Facebook pages – that those lucky pages with high follower counts get all the engagement and visitors!
Well, this would be the case if the Facebook follower algorithm distributed reach in a linear fashion. But it doesn’t – reach actually tails off quite dramatically after 50k followers, and again after 100k, and even more after 500k.
I have some quiz pages with just 14k quality followers outperforming much larger, older audiences in the same niche as mine. Why?
Think about it – if Facebook distributed all the reach to huge pages, all you would see on the timeline are posts from just those small number of monster pages – but you don’t.
Also, many of those pages with huge audiences are very old, which means the all-important follower quality is diluted with users who rarely engage anymore, have wandered off the Facebook platform, or have hidden all their page posts.
Myth #2: The reach is so low on Facebook now that’s it not worth it
I’ve been getting traffic from Facebook for over 10 years and low reach has always been a difficult issue. Nothing has changed there!
Just dismissing the platform because the reach is perceived as low compared to other social networks means missing out on so much potential free traffic.
The real issue is people just don’t know what kind of content to post on Facebook, or how to create posts that effectively generate clicks through to their websites, and finally, they just don’t post often enough!
You can’t hope to generate sizeable traffic each day to your website from Facebook if you only post once or twice a day. Facebook organic traffic is a numbers game, and to create serious traffic you’ll need to be posting 8 to 24 times a day!
Myth #3: There is no reach with link posts
I often hear people complaining that even though they are getting great engagement and reach with images, reels, and videos, their link posts fail to generate sufficient engagement or clicks.
This is a really common problem and it’s usually due to a mismatch between what your audience responds to and what kind of post links you are putting on Facebook.
If you are finding that a certain type of image, meme, status message, or video is getting great traction and going viral, that’s your clue as to what your audience wants from your website content and link posts.
Some things you can try to boost your traffic is making your link post thumbnail more like the kind of images that are working for you on your page, even if that content is not specifically related to your article, such as a viral meme, text caption or other, left-field thumbnail.
The other area to pay attention to is with your post title (otherwise called the headline), which needs to be enticing enough for the Facebook user to click the link post to find out more.
Myth #4: Social media schedulers reduce Facebook reach
If I had a dime for every time I heard this one… well, you know!
I don’t know where this myth originated but I’ve extensively tested this theory and seen absolutely zero data to prove that scheduling your posts using a tool like Hootsuite or Post Planner reduces your post reach and traffic.
If you think about it, the majority of posts on Facebook are scheduled, because no one (especially businesses) has time to sit on Facebook 24/7 manually posting.
If lower reach was a result of automating your posts, then the dozens of social media posting tools would have a hard time just existing, and businesses would not be able to use Facebook effectively.
I believe this myth may have started as a route to explaining away why some posts experience poor reach and engagement when the reality is bad performance on Facebook is the result of these 5 most common factors:
- Poor quality, untargeted, or 3rd-party acquired page audiences
- Site content is not aligned with the page niche follower base, or with the Facebook audience mindset in general
- Not a sufficient quantity of followers
- Post link thumbnails not optimized for a Facebook audience or the niche
- Posting too infrequently, less than 8 times per day
I hope that has been helpful, and helped debunk some common Facebook traffic myths I hear, and maybe given you the confidence to keep going with the Facebook model even if you had doubts!
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