Facebook - How to Get Your Fans to See Your Page

Reports from small business owners is that the November changes to Facebook and then the recent Timeline change have both impacted negatively in page interaction and lead in many cases to a fall in sales. 

This may be very frustrating to page owners, but facebook now works on the very reasonable assumption that if someone really does like a page they will interact with it and continue to do so.  It means that Facebook users no longer have to go and unlike the pages that they are no longer interested in - as those pages will slowly slip away into the mist naturally.  If you think about it from a user's point of view, it is totally sane.

But from a page owner's point of view, it can be a bit of a nightmare!

There are many very complicated metrics that work to decide exactly how long your posts continue to be shown in someone's feed before they start to drop out and not be shown as often or not at all.   And to make things just that bit more fun, it's not the same for all interactions, for all users, or for all pages, so there is no magic formula I or anyone else can share with you. 

However, what we do know is that  
more interaction = more chance of being seen

Here are a few basic things you need to know:

• liking a page no longer means the liker will see all that page's posts in their feed
• people no longer have to like your page to see it in their feed
• in order to see a page in their feed, a person must interact with it
• the interactions must continue - once someone stops interacting with the page it will begin to drop out of their feed until posts are no longer seen.

Okay, so, you need to be interesting - it's that simple.  Think about what your fans want to see - why did they like you or interact with you in the first place?  Are you funny?  Do they like your goods?   Do they like to answer questions you ask?  Are your photos shared far and wide? 

In the coming posts, I will talk about how to work out what your followers like and how to use that information to keep them interacting... meanwhile, make sure you post on average once a day to keep people interested!

Video Tour of the New Facebook Business Page Timeline

This video walks Facebook users through the new timeline for business, with detailed help on the many features and what you can do with them.  It's over 8 minutes long but is well worth it, as it's very clear and concise, and covers a lot of the quirks too.

Watch it here 

~Dianne

How To Get Your Facebook Business Timeline

If you want to take a peek at the new business timeline features, go to Facebook's own page and it's all explained there.

In a nutshell:

• if you see the banner at the top of your business page asking you whether you want to use timeline, click 'learn more'.  This takes you to the 'learning more about facebook timeline' page
• Click 'preview your pages' (top left)
• You will be asked to log in as your personal account - do that.  This takes you to a 'page update status' page
• Choose the business pages you want to change over to timeline, turn on preview, and then - if you wish - publish.

That's all there is to it.

This is one of my business pages, post-pimping.

If you want a closer look at the new layout before jumping right in, have a look at these examples


https://www.facebook.com/theamazingspiderman

https://www.facebook.com/Starbucks
https://www.facebook.com/mooandflo

Do let me know what you think about the changes and how easy they were to implement.

~Dianne

Facebook Timeline for Brands and Businesses - Announcement Due

Facebook are due to announce more changes, and amongst other things they will be bringing in a timeline for businesses and brands.

Announced by Live Stream
They invite us to join them on Wednesday 29th February as they "...announce Facebook's newest and most powerful marketing products."  promising us hapless users that "Facebook and industry leaders will share new solutions, actionable insights, and strategies to drive business growth using social technology."

You can watch it live here.

Thumbs Up or Feed to the Lions?
Whether these changes will be received any better than the personal timeline was is yet to be seen.  Whether they cater for small businesses as well as they giants will be foremost in many minds - certainly the changes late last year seemed detrimental overall to the small business owner.

However, timeline might just lend itself well to promoting brands as it could provide a stream of branding and marketing information that Facebook users can easily access and read, and there's hope that this might be just as useful for us minnows as it is for the giants.

Timing of the Announcement
For us Kiwis, New Zealand is 18 hours ahead of New York, so we will have to be awake at 7am Thursday morning if we want to watch it live.  And it goes on for five hours. Crimminy!

I'm thinking maybe a fair few people will have other things to do at 7am and midday, like, maybe work, so I'll keep you all updated with news as it comes in via the blog and my Twitter stream

Watch this space.
~Dianne

Follow me on Twitter - Dianne Khan @ FloBusiness