Using Facebook as a business can seem like hard work, cutting through the noise and algorithms to reach your target consumers. Worried that you don’t have a large enough following? Don’t be.

Numbers aren’t everything

Numbers aren’t everything. In fact, they can mean nothing at all. In a world where you can buy anything if you’re prepared to pay, you can actually buy followers. So if a competitor has a large following, don’t be put off and give up, they might not even be real. And if they aren’t real people, it naturally follows that they will never become customers, so they are actually pointless to have.

Also, no matter how many followers you have, every follower won’t see every piece of your content (particularly if they are bot accounts and paid for followers who have no interest at all in your brand). However, a smaller engaged following is much more likely to be useful to you in nurturing engagement and leads.

Work on compelling content

Facebook’s algorithm orders posts for each user in a way that it deems will be most relevant to them. It prioritises their friends content and interactions over business pages, so the way to ensure your content is seen is to work hard at creating compelling useful content that your customers will want to share with their friends.

If you have a smaller number of genuine, authentic followers who like you/your business, they are more likely to share your content, thus be shown it more often by Facebook, and then share it again. A virtuous circle, meaning eventually your content will be seen by their friends. Follower number growth will be small and steady but crucially, should gain momentum.

A narrower reach could mean higher engagement

With a smaller audience, you have by definition a narrower reach (the number of people your content will be viewed by) but this is also likely to mean higher engagement when they do see your content. Use this smaller group to your advantage by timing your posts when they are sure to be online, and create content (particularly video or discussion based content) which is bespoke to that audience. Once your numbers increase, you can keep this approach by running several streams of more targeted content by segmenting your audience.

An engaged smaller following is far more beneficial than a huge unengaged following, which is why you don’t always need a large facebook audience.