Like

Tips for Getting Seen on Facebook

24 Oct
by Caitlin Thayer, posted in Facebook, Social Media   |  No Comments

Did you ever wonder why you never see some of your friends in your Facebook News Feed? If you only have 3 friends you probably get to see all three in the News Feed, but if you have  few hundred there are most likely a handful that never show up. Tom Weber and The Daily Beast did a one month test to see if they could figure out how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm works.This also applies to business pages. If the members of your organization’s page on Facebook have a few hundred friends and like a lot of business pages, you’ll have to fight for your spot in their News Feed.

The Daily Beast’s one-month experiment into Facebook’s news feed yielded the following discoveries:

  • A bias against newcomers
  • “Most Recent” doesn’t tell the whole story.
  • Links are favored over status updates, and photos and videos trump links.
  • “Stalking” your friends won’t get you noticed.
  • Raise your visibility by getting people to comment.
  • It’s hard to get the attention of “popular kids.”

As a business owner getting started on social media, you may read that and think that it would be fairly impossible to grow your business page, especially if you won’t be showing up in anyone’s News Feeds because you’re new and you don’t get any interactions. Whenever I do presentations I always get asked by those getting started on Facebook how they can begin to grow their page members. Here are the tips I give to all of my clients:

1) Get your friends involved. If you’re a small business owner, or you’re the solo employee, you don’t have much of a choice on this one. A lot of people like to separate their business Facebook from their personal Facebook, but you’re friends support what you do (I hope) and should be willing to join your business page in order to help you grow it. Ask them to join, and then ask them to suggest the page to their friends.

2) Get your staff involved. If you have a business with some staff members, get them on board with being on Facebook. Tell them why you’re doing it, what you hope to get out of it, and what they can do to help. Like your friends, ask them to join the page and suggest it to their own friends.

3) Ask your friends/staff to interact. From the article we learned that profiles and pages show up in the News Feed more often when posts/photos/videos get a lot of comments and interactions. When you’re getting started, ask a couple of friends and staff members to be dedicated commenters. This will also help break the ice for new page members to feel comfortable interacting as well.

4) Put the Facebook logo on your home page. If you’ve already got the traffic on your website, why not tap into that to help grow your Facebook page? If someone has taken the time to check out your website and what you’re all about, it’s likely they’ll be willing to join you on Facebook as well to see what you talk about there.

5) When you get to 25 page members, create your unique URL. A lot of people forget about this, but it’s so important because it will help you market your page. Put that URL on your business cards and in your email signature. To do this, go to facebook.com/username and it will prompt you to create your own URL (facebook.com/whateveryouwant). Make sure you spell it correctly, because it can’t be changed!

6) Keep the posts coming. Even before you start worrying about getting people to your page, you should be worrying about what they’ll see when they get there. You can be actively inviting people to join, but if when they get there they see two posts that were posted over a week ago, they might not stay. Sometimes it feels weird to be posting information and asking questions when no one is responding, but keep it up and over time you’ll see an increase in your interactions. And make sure the posts include a variety of photos, videos and links. Like they said in the article, links are favored in the News Feed over plain status updates, and photos and videos favored over links.

Do you check your Facebook updates?

13 Jul
by Caitlin Thayer, posted in Facebook, Social Media   |  1 Comments

So, Facebook updates. Raise your hand if you can tell me how to find your Facebook updates. They’re currently tucked away within your Facebook messages page. Does anyone remember when updates used to be featured on the home page? You’d see how many updates you had received on the top right corner of the home page. For an organization with an Official Page, having the updates on the home page was great. Everyone would get a very visible notice when they received an update from any organization that they were a fan of. Now, any update I receive gets lost among the messages I receive. Maybe it’s just me, but I frequently forget that updates even exist! I went into my inbox today and found that I have over 500 unread updates.

Facebook seems to be changing they layout without organizations and Pages in mind. When Facebook first started, groups were more popular for organizations, Pages were useless. Then they changed the layout of the Pages so everyone switched from groups to Fan Pages. Updates were front and center and life was good. Now, updates are hidden and forgotten.

So what can organizations do? Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt to keep sending the updates. There are people out there who still make the effort to read them. But also make sure you’re sending out the important information through the Page itself. Remember, you can post items multiple times! Not everyone will see it the first or second time you post it. You aren’t annoying anyone with multiple postings, so go for it!

The other problems with Pages are that administrators can’t invite Page members to events. Facebook reprimands those organizations that create a person for their organization so that means that the employees of said organization have to pull from their own friend lists over and over again. As someone who has invited friends to work events over, and over, and over – it gets old.

The good news is, remember that blog I wrote a while back about how annoying it was that the person who created the Official Page would be the administrator forever and ever? Well, that’s not the case anymore. In case you hadn’t noticed, anyone can be removed as an administrator. I’d like to think it’s because of the e-mails I sent. You can bet I’ll be sending more about the updates.

“Become a Fan” is Old News for Facebook Pages

19 Apr
by Caitlin Thayer, posted in Facebook   |  1 Comments

As of this afternoon the words “Become a fan” don’t mean much on Facebook anymore. Rather than becoming a fan of a page, you will now “Like” the page, the same way you can like a friend’s status or a posted link. Facebook says they did this because they found that more people are more likely to say they like something; an organization or a brand rather than become a fan of it.

So what does this mean for your Facebook page? It now looks a little different – with a box that says how many people like the page, and a new box that lets you know how many of your own friends like that page. Fortunately for those of us who have been working on our “fan” pages for a while, the number of “fans” that you’ve gotten hasn’t disappeared but has switched over to how many people like the page.

The new box that shows you how many of your friends like the page could be great for the page itself – when someone visits your page for the first time they could be positively influenced to like the page themselves if they see their friends already like it. The other visual change is that the “Become a Fan” button has changed to a “Like” button.

From what I’ve seen so far from my friends on Facebook and Twitter, they don’t seem to like the Like button… hmm, there’s really no way around that pun. I’ll have to hold judgment until I see what actually happens to my pages and get back to you. I feel like much of that attitude comes from dislike of the change itself. How many times have we seen pages and groups created because of a change Facebook has made? Give this one a chance everyone… it may end up working for you better than you might think. So, your thoughts for now? How do you think this will affect your own pages?