If you are a musician or artist as much as you like Facebook as a promotional tool you hate the way that it often limits the reach of your posts.  Here’s some of the factors that cause that to happen:

• Facebook will restrict the reach of posts which use the words “like” “comment” or “share” in the post text. Facebook says you shouldn’t have to ask and if you do you are ‘gaming the system’ and it will penalise your post.

Asking for a like, comment or share will reduce a Facebook post’s organic reach.

• Facebook limits the reach of what it calls “overly promotional posts”.  Within the text of a post Facebook looks for ‘keywords’ (buy now, ‘click here to order’ etc.).  A  lot of the time this will be links to your gig tickets or online store, information about your upcoming shows etc.  If it finds such words and phrases it will restrict the reach of the post forcing you to pay to ‘boost’ it if you want a bigger audience.

So, how can you still inform your fans of new releases, gigs etc. but not fall foul of the ‘promotional police’?  One way to do this is to incorporate any ‘sensitive’ text within an image rather than within the status itself.

In this example, the ‘share’ request is conveyed as text directly within the image.

Here, I’ve run a competition on my band’s Facebook page and put all the text which could restrict our reach within in the jpg rather than the text that accomapanies the image.

Takeaway tip: If you are doing any promoting or selling on Facebook place relevant text within an image accompanying the post rather than the status itself.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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