As anyone who has been on Facebook for more than a day will know, many, many business pages are re-posting that viral statement about how "only 10% of our audience is seeing our posts", etc, etc. Following a heavy dose of negative press on the issue from some of the more influential social media bloggers out there, Facebook appears to have come up with a solution. Or, shall we say, a convolution?
Introducing Facebook Pages Feed. On the left-hand side of your News Feed, buried amongst all the other links you never look at - below your Favorites, perhaps above your Groups, somewhere near your Apps - there is a new link titled "Pages Feed". Clicking this link will bring you to a news feed that is dedicated to all the Pages that you follow. Unfortunately, this page is not organized chronologically and the jury is still out about the completeness of the posting history of your Liked Pages that is represented here.
I'm guessing that Facebook probably views this option as an olive branch to business page owners who have been negatively affected by the mass reduction in views of their posts. But, in reality, this is more like the branch that your hiking partner pushes out of the way only to let it snap back and slap you in the face. Does anybody at Facebook HQ not remember "Interest Lists" and the mass
There are several points to make about this whole Facebook conundrum:
- 1. If you are using Facebook as your primary content delivery system, you are putting yourself at the mercy of the social media giant's whims and fancies.
2. Due to the recent changes, you are already missing out on a ton of potential user engagement due to Facebook's ever-changing EdgeRank algorithm and the myriad variables involved in optimizing your position within your fans' News Feeds.
3. Speaking of EdgeRank...Google it. Learn it. Make it work for you or risk sinking into the News Feed abyss.
4. For those fans who made the effort to select your page to view in their normal News Feed, this will not affect their ability to still do so.
5. EdgeRank continues to be a fluid, evolving algorithm that, like it or not, you are going to have to figure out how to work with. That means tracking your key indicators, making notes of what types of posts track well with your audience and altering your posting habits to make the most out of these factors.
Facebook is an excellent example of evolutionary formatting from a service-provider standpoint. Unfortunately, they tend to light fires before making sure there's enough water to put them out and their response to obvious formatting mistakes has been historically slow. This puts Facebook business users in the position of needing to really spend more time on page management which potentially detracts from other essential business time. After all, which is more likely? That you will spend more time trying to get your content in front of your fans or that they will spend more time trying to reach your content amidst the plethora of other posts, comments, likes, photos and sponsored posts that are also being tossed at them every minute of the day?
About the Author: Jeremy Jones is the Senior Marketing Strategist for 603 Media Group. Primarily tasked with the challenges of keeping our small business running, Jeremy also occasionally branches out into public speaking, blogging, website design and raising his nine-year-old son to not be another one of "those damn kids".
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