Using Facebook to build your massage business (2021 update)

You have probably noticed it is getting more and more difficult to get a post on Facebook to be seen by your followers. That is because in the past few years, FB has been tweeking their algrithims. The average organic reach is a mere 5.2% and that is according to very recent studies by Hootsuite and WeAeSocial.

You can post the most important post that will give the top secret key to health and no one will see it, yet a post of a cat massaging a cat will often go farther.

To calculate your own Facebook page reach use this forumula:

Take the number of people reached by one post which is the number beneath a post when you’re looking at it as an admin and divide by the number of people who have liked/followed your page. (If you have the New Page Experience (NPE) it will only say followers.) Then multiply by 100 to get the percentage. Followers are supposedly the main people who will see your posts if at all.

New Page Experience (NPE)

FB started rolling out New Page Experiences in Jan 2021. The NPE will make it so pages only have followers. The page like button is going away. The profile picture will be in the center of the cover photo rather than at the left.

At some point, your page will be transitioned to the NPE. Facebook recommends that you stop using the Business Suite and not the Business Manager.

The big change will be the things going away:

Page Likes: If someone likes your Page and is also a follower, they will still follow your new Page.

Publishing tools, such as scheduled posts

Business features, such as jobs, appointments, offers

Classic Page features, such as reviews, check-ins, Page templates

Manage from mobile web browsers: You can manage the new Page from the Facebook mobile app, but not from mobile web browsers.

~ Facebook Help page

How does Facebook Reach Work?

1. Inventory – ALL of the posts on Facebook
2. Signals – Of all of the billions of users and post, FB has to figure out what to show you. It uses signals such as how many friends you have, what is in your favorites list, how many pages you like, have you interacted with them before, the type of content posted (links, images, videos), who is tagged and how recent the post is. They also look at things like who you are messaging with. Commenting on a post is one of the strongest signals as it shows you were engaged enough or moved enough to say something. Facebook has added threads to comments to keep things going.
3. Predictions – Facebook’s machine learning system tracks your signals and predicts what posts you might be interested in and want to interact with. It tracks everything you have ever commented on or liked, shared etc. —your whole history!
4. Relevance score – They take all this history and give it a score to determine what to show you in your feed.

Why do you need to know all this? To train the alogrithm!

Training Facebook

The first step is to figure out your goals. Get more clients. Get repeat clients. Sell a product. But how many? Be specific in your goals. It supposedly takes 30 days to train the AI.

Then start with setting up your Favorites and asking your followers to add you to their favorites. Facebook allows you to add 30 friends or pages to your favorites. Start with adding 20 at the most otherwise it gets to be too many posts or test the number to see what happens. See the Facebook help page on how to set up favorites.

Training the alogrithm is a matter of testing and seeing what works best for you. The things you will want to focus on are:

• Doing a short video/live post 1-2x a week.
• Make 2 question posts a week. Questions that make people want to answer. It could be something simple or complex.
• It is also recommended to create a Facebook group but in some ways it gets to personal with clients/potential clients. You can join local groups to share info and watch for when someone is asking about massage in the area and become the local expert on some topic other than massage that you are interested in.
• Stick something in the weekly lineup that is different than all of the other things you are trying to see what it does to see if something will create a jump in your reach.
• When you get a post that does get a high reach, you have the opportunity after it to get more traction with your next few posts.

Resources:

How does Newsfeed work – from Facebook

How does News Feed predict what you want to see?