Making your campaign visible: organic reach

Once you have identified your audience and thought about your key messages, you need to consider how to get your content in front of them.

There are millions of accounts publishing billions of content updates every day. You can post on most social platforms for free, but it’s difficult to ensure your campaign is visible in a crowded online space. In this step, you will explore one social media marketing strategy which is known as organic social media marketing or organic reach, where social media platforms show content to users without payment.

Organic reach

Most social media platforms are based around the following core concepts:

• An individual user who can follow and be followed by other users to create a network of relationships.
• Each user posts content which can be seen by their followers.
• Each user can see posts from one person they follow, or a ‘stream’ of amalgamated updates from everyone they follow.

A social media stream acts like a TV channel containing content created by all the people you follow in that space. Scheduling content to be posted at peak times allows you to optimise for this stream, making your content more visible and giving it greater reach.

Understanding algorithms

In the early days of social media sites and blogs, the stream was reverse chronological with the most recent content at the top and older items further down the page. The recency, or timestamp attached to a piece of content, dictated where it appeared in the stream.

Today major platforms operate differently. Instead of determining order by time of publication alone, they instead use ‘importance’ or ‘relevance’ scores to determine when, and whether, to show content to users.

This relevance is determined by an algorithm, a step-by-step set of rules used to process information or data. Social media companies tend to be secretive about the exact factors which contribute to how the algorithm determines relevance. They also frequently tweak the input factors and metrics, so that the algorithm can’t be exploited.

For example:

A supermarket announces that shoppers wearing red hats will get a 50% discount at the cash register. How many people will show up the next day to do their shopping wearing red hats?

• Recency of publishing, editing, or commenting.
• Does it contain a photo or other multimedia?
• How long is it?
• Is the content topical and are other users on the site also posting about it?
• Is it a repost or something new?
• How many likes/favourites does it have?
• How many comments?

• How active is the user on the site?
• How long has the user been on the site?
• Does the user’s previous content typically attract engagement, such as comments, likes and shares?
• Does the user engage with others’ content?

Summing up

Give feedback:

• What’s your reaction to the factors involved in algorithmic content selection?
• How does understanding the algorithmic selection make you feel?

You could also reflect on the content you see on your own social media platforms. What do you notice about the content that appears?

Share your thoughts in the Comments section.