In recent years, organic reach on Facebook has seen a strong decline. Reach is defined as the number of people who have seen your post. On your personal Facebook, you aren't going to see this number, but for anyone running a Facebook page -this is an important number.

The challenge for social media marketing started a few years ago when Facebook began suppressing the reach of posts from Pages. Organic reach started to decline as early as 3 years ago. In 2012 = between 15-20% of people who had "liked" your Page saw organic posts. In 2013 that number dropped to ~10% and by 2014 it dropped to 1-3%.

This left many social media marketing teams with no choice but to "pay to play". Facebook started to offer a "Boost Post" option at the same time it started to suppress organic reach. Boosting a post raises the percentage of people who have liked your page who get to see your post in their News Feed.

But do you really have to pay to play?

Sometimes. Here are three top tips to get your Facebook page working for you again.

Boost post:

A boosted post starts out as an organic post. Once you have created the post, you have the option to "boost". The image below shows you some of the options you can select. Generally, I favor "People who like your Page". The other options open you up to be marked as a spammer and should be only considered in a campaign to reach net-new audiences. A boost can start as low as$5 and your reach will vary based on your total audience. In addition, this small investment helps drive organic traffic for posts that follow within a couple days after the boost starts. This is a great option if you have seen your reach drop so low you cannot break out of the low reach conundrum and drive engagement.

Know when your Audience is Online:

Facebook gives you the tools to find this. Go to your Insights, choose "Posts" then the tab for When your Fans are Online. In the example below, you can see the top times for when fans are online is between 5am and 9am PST with Wednesday and Friday the busiest days.

Use popular hashtags and ask a question:

The hashtag#TBT for Throwback Thursday has gained popularity not just on Twitter but on Facebook. By using it in this post and asking a question, we saw 3x the normal organic reach and 3x the engagement rate!

The bottom line -you can reach the audience who has opted-in to your Facebook Page. By combining very selective use of your budget for boosting, with knowing your audience and using creative social content, you can bring your engagement numbers up on Facebook and reach your audience.

See these examples and more social media success on the Cisco Data Center Facebook page.