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Our Facebook page reach was declining along with everyone else's over the past few months. There were some posts that, although quality content and well-formatted, were reaching less than 1% of our audience.

Something changed mid-August though, and now our organic reach is much much better (an average of 8% per post). I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is, but I don't think it's related to paid advertising. I've been reluctant to pay to boost any posts, although we did test one in July, and it had no immediate impact on the reach of our other posts.

From what I've looked at regarding our content, here are some things that I think have played the biggest factor in our reach improvement:

1. Evergreen content: I went back to our website and picked some of our past posts that still get consistently high search traffic and re-shared them as "classic" posts.

2. External/curated content: Some websites (like Mashable, TechCrunch, etc.) have proven reach on Facebook. Where it's relevant to your audience, it's worth sharing a Facebook post (or more) from one of these media outlets. I also shared our content that existed on other platforms (SlideShare, namely), and saw those posts get better reach over time.

3. Optimized post timing: I post 5x a day on Facebook (3 in the morning and 2 in the late afternoon). I never would've planned on scheduling posts for the late afternoon, but when I looked at the post insights on Facebook, it was obvious that there was another bump in our audience behavior between 5-9pm. Look for those smaller peaks in your insights, and optimize some posts for those timeframes.

4. Tags and hashtags: where possible, use popular hashtags in your post to help boost discoverability. Same thing goes for tagging other Facebook pages in your post. More likely to get likes and shares from these tactics.

I actually just wrote a blog post about this today, and said more or less the same thing as above. Still, if you're interested in some longer reading, here it is: http://articles.bplans.com/went-vacation-increased-facebook-traffic-300-heres/

• Jonathan Michael
  Community Manager
  Bplans.com

Thanks Axial,

I'm not convinced it matters much if Google crawls deep pages they wouldn't find through organic links. If the pages aren't linked to they won't have any link juice and therefore won't rank well in SERPs.

The link about using site maps for canonical URLs says or implies you should only put your most important URLs in the sitemap. The sitemap tools I've seen tend to take a kitchen sink approach, which is needed if you are using it to try to get a deeper crawl. Plus there's no way (I see) in a sitemap to specify that page A is the canonical of page B. They simply suggest telling Google about page A (and not page B) in the hopes page A will get more weight than page B. A canonical meta tag on page B pointing to page A is obviously a much better way to deal with canonicals.

Image and video site maps are potentially valuable. I am asking specifically about site maps for pages.

Specifying related content for a given URL, such as different languages, is indeed useful and not something I was aware of. But it is not applicable on most sites and not used on most site maps.