Are you reaching people virally?

One thing that I love about the new Facebook insights is that I don’t just see who is talking about my page, I also see how many of their friends have seen it.

The insights show the viral reach which is the number of people who saw a story published by a friend about your page.

You can see below the people who are talking about my Social Rabbit page (that means that are have liked, commented, shared or posted on the page wall) versus the viral reach.

I love that although the third point on the talking about this chart is 120 people (they calculate it the seven days ending on the date the point is), the viral reach is actually 4,161 people – wow!

These insights give page admins a good look into what is happening not just on their page, but on Facebook. It also shows that you shouldn’t look at your talking about this number and think, that sucks… but in actual fact you will have reached more people through their friends.

It is interesting that on my page where I have 4,478 people who “like” it, the talking about this number is around 100 people and the viral reach is closer to the number on the page, but I am still NOT reaching everyone. It is very unlikely that I (or any page) will ever reach everyone at the same time due to people’s habits, time zones and interaction levels.

Tips to get your viral reach up:

• Write content that begs to be shared – that means interesting/amusing/entertaining/educational, etc that people like so much they tell their friends about it.
• Ask questions – every time someone comments on your posts it is seen by their friends, which means:
  – Your posts are more likely to be seen in your page “likers” newsfeeds (Facebook rewards pages who have higher interaction).
  – Your posts (and therefore page) are seen by more people.
• Encourage “likes” – Try writing posts where you might say “like this post if you agree”, telling people to do it will mean more will actually do it.
• Respond to comments – As you respond to comments more people will comment, or indeed the same ones will comment again, which will increase the viral reach of your page.

Facebook is the same as any method of marketing your business, you need to put in time and effort (or pay someone) to get the results, your viral reach could easily go up literally overnight, but a one-off event isn’t enough – you need to do it consistently.

Viral eeach all comes down to content and engagement equals time and effort – I don’t know of any short cuts. If you have any tips let me know below.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks mobile phone socks, Chief Rabbit at Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media, founder of Steps – the online Facebook and LinkedIn training course and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.