The Never Updated Blog

Well, more than a year since my last post and yet, this still seemed like the best place to put this post.

It is a response to Ed Dale's blog post There Is Something Rotten In The State Of Facebook. (There's some nice anchor text for you Ed, even if it comes from a garbage blog like this!)

For those who haven't read the blog post and are too lazy to follow the link and do so now, Ed's main beef is that Facebook only delivers a Facebook page's content to 10-12% of it's fan's news feeds by default. He feels that if he has put the effort into convincing thousands of people to like his page, that all of them should get every one of his posts delivered to their news feed. He also pointed out that scheduling services such as Hootsuite and Buffer seem to be getting your posts put in the bad books with Facebook which means they reach even fewer of your fans.

I have noticed the same thing with my clients, but I have come to a slightly different conclusion. Social following is important for search results.

Some clients with a large fan base have their Facebook pages appear higher in Google's search results than their websites do. So Ed, if you check your Facebook page stats and see how much traffic it gets from Google, it might not be such a bad thing to keep the effort going. A Facebook page is still not a bad place for a first encounter with a prospect as long as you are strategic about the way that encounter happens.

What I like to do for my clients is really push to get their fans onto a mailing list via an opt-in on a custom tab. Email open rates might not be sooo much higher than the 10-12% that Facebook deigns to show our posts to, but hopefully it is a different chunk of your following than see the post in their news feed.

I have noticed that Facebook seems to dole out it out slowly - 5% or so of your fans at first, but then posts with one like see a couple more percent, posts with one share see a couple more percent again. I haven't analyzed it so much as to be able to make it a science (eg I can't say with certainty that a post with ten likes and two shares = 36% of your fans will see it), but I have noticed that there IS a pattern.

It does make sense from Facebook's point of view - there is limited space on everyone's news feed to get every update from every friend and page they have ever liked.

I see it as an incentive to post good content. If you post good content, people will like and share it and comment on it and therefore more people will see it in their news feed.

Remember when the internet was young and search engines were only returning manageable numbers of search results? Then things got crazy and the importance of backlinks increased. They became the currency of standing on the search engines. The idea was that people would only backlink to quality content and therefore, pages with many backlinks must be worth putting at the top.

Now likes, comments and shares are the currency of news feed penetration on Facebook.

Over at Facebook they figure that people only like, comment and share good content, therefore, when they show your content to a few of your fans, if it gets liked, commented on or shared, it must be worth showing to more of your fans.

One place this is clearly true is in the Facebook search. People are beginning to put in search terms into Facebook instead of going to old man Google. I admit that I have done that on occasion when I have been looking for something.

The search results that come up are almost always in descending order of the number of likes. As more and more pages are created, more Facebook users are going to begin using Facebook search instead of Google, that means pages will rank higher than Bing search results and pages with relevant keywords and many likes will end up at the top of the list.

So, admit it, your Facebook page still has some value, right? Although, the Ed Dale page and other public figure pages probably have less value than pages with key word dense titles. You show up if someone searches for Ed Dale, but even a page with 7 367 likes shows up in the Facebook search results for internet marketing when your page with 11 126 likes is nowhere to be found!

Also, you must admit that, underneath the indignation of being told that your posts won't, by default be broadcast to every fan, you secretly know that not all of your posts are worth showing to everyone!

For instance, do you realistically think that all 11 126 of your fans needed to see the post on July 27th about the Sewing Projects & Tips mag? I got that one in my news feed (first one of yours to show up in my feed in quite a while) and it made me ask myself, why am I seeing this?

So, all of this is just to say that Facebook is not going anywhere so you might as well stop complaining about it and try to use it as strategically as possible. The digiratti might be rejecting it in favour of Google+ or twitter, but the average internet user has no clue what Google+ is and can't be bothered with twitter.

They DO want to see their friend's brother's drunken escapades overseas and they do want to feel like they can have a personal contact with the companies who's products and services they use. There ARE ways of getting your posts seen by more than 10% of your fans.

That's it for now!