The way Facebook determines which people it shows your fan page posts to is constantly changing, but that also means there’s constantly new strategies you can use to ensure that more people are actually seeing what you post.

I was lucky enough to have some conversations with people who work at Facebook recently and those, combined with some of my own experimentation, have led me to realize a few things that can have a big impact on getting more of your posts into people’s news feeds – even without spending any money on Facebook ads (even though I still think Facebook ads are a great tool).

Here’s what I recommend at the moment…

1. Post More Often

For the past several years Facebook actually used to punish you for posting more than a couple times a day on your fan page. But that recently changed and now there’s no penalty for frequent posting as long as you space out your posts by at least a few minutes (probably better to give it at least a 30-minute gap between posts just to be safe).

This means that chances are the more often you post, the more people will see your stuff (in total).

However, there is one big caveat to this – you still need to make sure you’re posting QUALITY content. Facebook still measures the engagement (Likes/Comments/Shares/Clicks) on every single thing you post and if your fans don’t engage with your posts, they will stop seeing them show up in their news feed.

So don’t just start posting more crap to increase the frequency because that will backfire. You want to find the right balance of quantity and (most importantly) quality posts.

2. Post Multiple Images In A Single Status Update

Because Facebook measures the quality of your posts based on the engagement your fans have with those posts, you want to post things in ways that generate the most possible engagement. One of the best ways I’ve found to do that is to post multiple photos in a single status update. This does a couple things…

First, the multi-photo post stands out in people’s news feeds because it tends to be bigger and there’s multiple thumbnail images that could catch a person’s eye. That makes them more likely to click and engage with the post.

Second, people tend to click through multiple times to view multiple photos in the post. Each of those clicks counts as engagement with the post and what winds up happening is Facebook sees the post as super engaging, which in turn tells its algorithm to show it to more fans, which in turn builds on itself and gets more of your stuff into more people’s feeds.

3. Post Your Videos In Facebook’s Video Player, Not YouTube’s

YouTube is great and you should upload all of your videos to YouTube as a general rule. However, when it comes time to share those videos on Facebook, you’ll be much better served to upload them into Facebook’s video player as well.

A lot of people are confused about Facebook’s video player, but to use it you just upload a video file the same way that you normally would a photo to post on the site.

On average, you’ll find that the same video uploaded into Facebook’s video player will get shown to at least 5 times as many people as the same video would if shared as a YouTube link. If you think about it, the reason behind this is obvious – Facebook would rather you use their video player than YouTube’s, so they’re rewarding people who do so by pushing those videos into more people’s news feeds.

4. Tag Other Fan Pages In Your Posts

This is another HUGE change that most people don’t know about. It used to be that the only people who could ever see your posts were people who were already fans of your page. But that’s not true any more.

Now, Facebook will also put your posts into the news feeds of people who have no connection to your page – but only if you’re talking about things that those people are already fans of.

For example, if you post something about the Spiderman movie and tag the Spiderman page in your post, there’s the potential for fans of Spiderman who don’t have any idea who you are to have that post show up in their news feed.

Obviously, that’s a huge opportunity for you to get exposed to new potential fans and you’d be wise to take advantage of it.

For example, here’s something I posted about Last Comic Standing and tagged the Last Comic Standing page in my post. As a result, 1,500 people who were not fans of Connected Comedy were exposed to that post.

5. Understand That Not All Engagement Is Created Equal

As I mentioned before, engagement with your posts is really the key that unlocks getting your stuff into people’s news feeds. But it’s also important to understand that not all engagement is created equal – Facebook weights different ways that people engage with your post and more highly rewards what they perceive as a bigger form of engagement.

I’m not 100% sure of this, but from conversations I’ve had with people that work for Facebook, I believe they view comments and shares as the most valuable form of engagement with a post, and then view Likes and clicks as secondary engagement metrics.

What this means for you is that you’ll want to frame your posts in a way that they generate the most possible comments and shares as opposed to just chasing Likes and clicks. Of course, those Likes and clicks are still valuable and better than no engagement at all, but the holy grail of engagement is to get people talking and sharing.

One More Thing…

If you found this post helpful, will you please take a moment and tweet about it? Thx!