The Facebook Mysteries
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Aug 17, 2011
How Do Posts Get Seen?
Dipping in to the Facebook pages utility for a business can be fun, exciting, and rewarding. But time and time again we get people wondering why and how other Facebook users see their business page posts. For business pages, the concept is that Facebook users have the ability to “like” a page to become fans of the business. This is useful, as it is kind of an opt in and an endorsement of your business and your page.
Why bother building a base on Facebook?
Building a fan base on a business page is a great confidence endorsement for a business or a brand. It also gives the business owner a broadcasting medium to communicate with fans of the page through the Facebook “wall”. This concept is much like that of signing up to a newsletter. So a wall post could be an effective way to broadcast a new promotion, product or service to the pages’ fans.
A Facebook user is presented with the newsfeed when the log into the site. It contains interesting posts from all the friends and pages the user is connected with. However, much like Google search results, Facebook also has its own algorithms to select which content gets shown to whom and when. This means the wall post is less likely to be seen compared to an email newsletter for example, as it is competing with other wall posts in the space. So if a number of the user’s friends have posted popular messages or wall posts, it is likely that the product announcement will get cut out.
Facebook is smart when it comes to marketing
Facebook uses an algorithm that judges relationships – between the business that published the item, and the users who are accessing their news feed. If a user has interacted with the business page on occasions before, it is more likely that this news item will show up in their feed. So users with low interactions are less likely to see the page’s content in their news feed.
The key lesson here is to make everything to do with a business page on Facebook engaging. Brands should be striving to post engaging content, ask questions, and encourage interaction with users on the platform. The more interaction a page gets, the more people will be exposed to it’s content. Facebook deems posts with more likes more important, and they are more likely to be seen.
Monitoring Social Media has become a very important tool for business' today. For more information on it, check out these 10 tips/reasons towards Social Media Marketing!
