The Simple Way to Get People to Read Your Blog Post on Facebook

One of the main issues with running a blog is getting readers. But attracting readers IS the hard part, it can be overwhelming deciding where and how to start.

Many people use social media to attract new readers to read their blog posts, download their ebooks, or sign up to their mailing lists. But, if you’re not careful you can spend more time trying to find new readers through social media than actually creating great writing for them to read!

There’s nothing more disappointing than crafting a blog post and having less than ten people come to your site to view it. But there is a simple trick that works to get people to read the blog you spent hours working on, and it only takes a tiny bit of formatting.

It’s more than just sharing the link

Of course you’ve shared the post to your facebook page, but there’s a little bit more to it than that.

Have you ever wondered why, when scrolling your facebook feed – random, giant stories pop-up? Whether it’s politically charged rants or someone imparting with their wisdom, it’s completely possible you could be one those people.

In Jon Loomer’s blog post, he explains why we should stop using Facebook text update and photos to share links. Jon runs a great experiment on Facebook updates and measures them by their organic reach.

Text only updates have considerable more reach than photos and links:

 

The Total Reach for the data used in Jon Loomer’s experiment is broken down as follows (Total Reach / Total Fans):

• Status Updates: 39.44%
• Photos: 28.34%
• Links: 26.69%

While I can’t prove this, I’d imagine it’s probably because Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook (as in click and go elsewhere). Facebook did drop a hint on this:

“Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves. In fact, in our initial test when we showed more status updates from friends it led to on average 9 million more status updates written each day. Because of this, we showed people more text status updates in their News Feed.”

And, there’s a hint that my assumption could be correct.

Here’s a week of the organic/total reach from photo and link updates from the Kayako Facebook account, a page with 10K+ likes:

 

Crazy isn’t it, 10k+ likes and one link was seen by only 75 people.

The one link that amassed 1.3K likes was through a loyal Kayako customer commenting on his delight about hearing more behind the scenes stories at Kayako. This led a few others to leave their joy at using Kayako too (for the kind and promoting comments, we sent them all company merchandise and a thank you note!).

While this seems promising, and it might be the way you’re currently posting, it’s not the best way to do it.

This is because you’re relying on someone to notice your link, click the link, read the blog all the way to the end, then come-back to Facebook and leave a comment. This is harder than running a click advertising campaign!

The effects of posting your blog to Facebook

This experiment was inspired by James Altucher, he uses this very technique. James has tried both Medium and Facebook to syndicate his blog. He’s stuck to Facebook and there must be a reason why.

With my wife’s dance blog (Lacey Sasso), I tried this very technique and the results were surprising.

For a page with just over three-hundred likes, this reach was already double her audience.

The post got a total of ninety-five post clicks (meaning they clicked “continue reading”). Lacey’s WordPress site stats were showing half as many click-throughs than this when it was shared as a link across both Facebook and Twitter for a month!

So with the next blog post that came out, I tried it again.

Again, an incredible reach for a post with a page of three-hundred-plus likes. This post was also picked up by a professor at a University who asked if she could share it with her students!

My only regret of this post is not paying to boost it. That could have really pushed it to be one of those viral posts.

[Note: If you’re in the early stages of finding what resonates with your audience. I’d highly recommend using this technique, because it’s very clear to see what takes off, and what doesn’t.]

Formatting your post for easy reading

Hopefully you can see the beginning of the layout of the post from the above screenshots, but this is my technique:

• Both the headings and subheadings are always in capitals.
• Be mindful of bombarding your reader with lots of lines of text. I’d recommend no more than having three lines before a line break, this breaks down that wall-of-text look and feel.

Before you post, look at your Facebook insights column. You want to post just before the surge in traffic, because this is how updates get picked up and rise to the top of the news feed.

Looking at this insights graph, I would post at 2pm.

But you can find your optimum posting time for each day by going, “Insights” > “Posts”. Then hover over each day to see when and where that spike is, it reveals when most of your audience are online. The more towards the start of the day, the more likely it will pick up momentum throughout it.

Post your update at the right time

Using the times you’ve found for your post to reach its optimum, there’s two options you can use for scheduling your post at the right time.

You can use Facebook’s scheduler.

 

Or, if you don’t have your Facebook set up as a page, you can use a service like Buffer.

Once you’ve scheduled it up and get ready to watch your post fly!

Copy and paste your blog to Facebook

When you’re spending hours crafting great pieces for your readers, you can’t rely on them to click through to your blog to read it. Use these simple steps: copy and paste your blog post into Facebook, post at the optimal time and get more readers. If you keep doing this, you’ll build better connections and strengthen your readers interest in your writing. This is the best way to get organic exposure without paying for extra reach.

If you apply this tactic, please leave a comment with your results, I’d love to know if it worked for you too!