As you may be aware, the recent Facebook (FB) updates of their posting mechanism has lead to quite a furore among the FB community. Many business owners, who leverage on FB’s Fan page to advertise, have gotten confused and irritated as they experienced a significant drop in their fan engagement.
Edgerank – Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm
According to the FB software engineer, Phil Zigoris, EdgeRank is an algorithm that optimizes the content of news feeds based on what is interesting to the user. Henceforth, an exciting newsfeed that has garner many “Likes”, “Comments” and “Shares” are more likely to appear more frequent than one about a friend taking a photo of himself/herself.
The recent Edgerank’s updates have also lead to a dramatic drop of impression of the fan page post seen by FB users. Consequently, each time a piece of content is posted; it would only reach out to about 15% of the Fans of the fan page. Understandably, this has affect businesses that have invested time and effort to build up their FB community and fan page.
Overcoming the odds – 3 ways to increase your reach on newsfeed when posting content
1. Inspire your fans to utilise their FB features
Aiming to be user-centric, FB is rolling out new features for users to curate content from their favourite brands and pages. By using features such as “Get Notification” (an option that appears when the mouse hovers above the “Like” button) on their favourite pages, users can ensure that they will not miss out on the respective pages ‘posting. Henceforth, if you own a fan page, try to encourage your fans to enable this “Get Notification” feature. This would increase the reach for your postings.
2. Be Creative and Viral
Leveraging on EdgeRank’s newsfeed mechanism, fan page owners can try to plan and craft impactful content that will draw “Comments”, “Likes” and “Share” clicks. Organic sharing and virality are the most natural ways to boost the reach of the post and to trigger FB to show the post to more people.
3. FB’s Promoted Post
Launched in last quarter September 2012, FB Promoted Post allows fan page owners (who has at least 400 fans) to pay for as little as one dollar to promote any post created during the last three days. By paying, you are able to reach more of your fans. When your fans engage in either one of the three actions “Like”, “Comment” and “Share” on the post, the friends of the fans will be able to see the post.
As you tinker ideas to increase virality for your posting, it would also be recommended to think of ways to engage your fans and procure their contact information. Many online blog shops may have affected by this recent FB Edgerank updates, but they are not entirely handicapped as they have built up a contact list of their current and potential customers. Many of them would have also done so by building a personalised emailer system. This would be most useful as Facebook changes their algorithm regularly and definitely you do not want to be at the mercy of these updates.
There you have, three ways to increase the reach of your FB posting and a recommendation of obtaining contacts so as to have more control over your marketing efforts.
Best of success to your FB marketing!
