In an age when promoted posts, ad placements, and other paid campaigns are an expected norm for social media marketers, organic reach is becoming increasingly attractive for those seeking to grow their audiences and shave dollars from their budgets. But the process of gaining that reach is not without its (initially hefty) price. After all, gathering data specific to your company’s audience requires taking a risk on unpromoted posts that may very well flop. With a wide range of variables impacting the efficacy of a post’s reach and engagement, it is not unusual for brands to simply opt for constant, affordable promotion of all their posts.

Over the past couple months, Locowise has released two studies specifically aimed at helping marketers improve the organic foundations of their habits. The data those two reports provide sheds new light on best practices for brands both big and small.

Building Reach

As it is for most marketing efforts, the first question to ask is, “How do I make people aware of my brand?” It’s this familiar space at the top of the funnel that, for Facebook and other social media platforms, tends to first translate into “How many people see my posts?”

A study released by Locowise in early March tackled this goal, surveying 500 Facebook pages. When combined, the pages represented more than 215 million total page likes, 27,000 posts in February alone, and more than 2 billion in reach. The report found the success of posts’ organic reach varied slightly based on the size of the Facebook following involved, but across the board link posts provided the best reach.

This was especially true for brands with less than 10,000 likes, where link posts accounted for 32 percent of page reach, followed in second by photos at 11 percent. This value was halved for pages between 10,000–99,999 posts or more than 100,000, at 16 percent and 15 percent respectively, with video content moving up into second place at 11 percent for both.

This particular study, however, did not speak to engagement. While the data may be of help in improving a page’s audience, it should not be relied upon as the sole direction of a page. Posting only one type of content consistently will usually exhaust followers, while also narrowing the number of channels made available for interacting with followers.

Using Reach

A second Locowise study released last month provides new insight into creating engagement from your new, growing audience. With link posts ruling the pack on reach, Locowise examined the relationship between average post reach and interaction for pages in the same three size categories as their first study.

Overall, reach remained low for most pages regardless of size (only the smallest Facebook pages broke 20 percent at 22.80 percent reach on average), with interactions likewise at low averages of 14.21 percent regardless of page size (this is perhaps partially due to Facebook’s decision to purge inactive accounts from pages’ like counts this past March). But across the board, when interaction was broken down, photo and video dominated organic engagement—a reinforcement of video’s efficacy, only compounded by the posts’ relative cheapness as organic.

Consider experimenting with organic posts for your brand’s page. If you’re taking the dive into video, watch this webinar to learn how to create and integrate video content into your own campaigns.