Facebook pages; how much fun are they? Truth be told, obviously some people aren’t having much fun at all because they don’t put much new content on it, if they put content on it at all. Two weeks ago I spent some time going through some of the pages I liked to see if they were doing anything, and those that weren’t I “unliked”; you know, when I was a kid that wasn’t even a word. lol
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Facebook pages are an odd duck, if you will. We create them because everywhere we’ve gone to talking about them says they can help us with our business. I’m not all that sure, but I do believe that if done right they can at least help give you a presence. But who’s seeing that presence, and what can you do to increase your presence?
There was this article on Jeff Bullas’ blog titled 6 Ways to Increase the Marketing Effectiveness of your Facebook Page, which includes this very cool infographic. It talks a little bit about Edgerank, which is the name of the algorithm Facebook uses to decide just how many people who have liked your page will have the opportunity to see whatever you put on your page. It’s based on a few things; how often those people have come to your site, so they participate in any way, do they ever share, etc. Actually, they use the same algorithm in determining how many of your friends and which friends see your general posts If you’re connected with 1,000 people on Facebook, you can bet that if 100 people ever see any of it you can count yourself lucky, unless you’ve made yourself popular.
Why do they do that? They do it because people share way more long form information on Facebook than they do on Twitter. On Twitter, every person I’m following has the ability to have me see everything they post via a general column. I have the ability to select certain people and put them in segregated columns so I definitely see what certain people post as opposed to everyone, but if I decide to check the general column the skies the limit.
On Facebook people share pictures, blog posts, etc. Some folks write long form prose of some type. If Facebook showed you every single thing that everyone posted, you’d be overwhelmed. Yes, you do have the ability to segregate your audience on Facebook at all, something I’ll cover at another time, but it’s still a lot of stuff.
So now you know why you don’t see everything from all your friends and why everyone doesn’t see everything you put on your Facebook page. How can you improve the odds of getting more people to see your stuff? The link I provided above gives you 6 ways. The idea is that, at least for your business page, you want to add more content to it so people have more to see, and you want to add more images because it’s been proven that people react better to them, but what if you’re not a bit time photographer, or the images you have don’t quite fit what your business is about?
Now, you might want to know how it’s going for me, since I adopted the process I talk about in my link about 3 weeks ago. I mainly post links from my business site since, well, it’s my Facebook business page. lol I do post a link here and there from this blog, the motivational stuff, but not all that often.
For the full month period before the last 3 weeks Facebook was my 5th best source of traffic, and I only had 21 visits. In the last 3 weeks Facebook has moved up to #3 and I had 55 visits in that time. Not only that but I went from a page duration time of 1 minute and 4 seconds to a whopping 14 minutes and 39 seconds. Why anyone would stay on a page for that long I couldn’t tell you, but what could be happening is that people could be sticking around and looking at other pages. And one more thing; from Facebook it’s a lot of repeat visitors, as the rate of new visitors is only 29%, as opposed to 95% from Google and 79% from Twitter.
Not so shabby I’d say. Anyway, I’ve told you about Edgerank, shared a link to an infographic, and a link to my post about ways of finding things you can add to your Facebook business page to help raise the number of people who come by. What else would you like to know? 🙂 By the way, if you’d like to see my page look to the left and click on the link that will take you there; always happy to have more likes for that page.
My facebook “business page” isn’t nearly as popular as my regular page. I guess I should do something about that. I confess I often forget about it, until I read a post like this one!
Holly, I’m connected to your Trockle page, and it’s been a long time since you’ve put anything on it. See, someone like me goes looking for content to share and use and it helps promote other people. You have to give us a way to help you help yourself, you know? 🙂
Hi Mitch, it’s always a back and forth struggle. Some posts on one of my business pages goes way up when I post funny quotes that relates to the niche but if I post a sale no one seems to care. I find if you interact with other pages with yours it helps too. Haven’t seen yours in my feed lately will have to visit it again. Thanks for sharing!
No problem Lisa, and I’m glad you got something out of the post. Yeah, trying to figure people out can be a strange task, but anything we can do to help our online presence, especially if it offers the prospect of business, can’t be ignored.
Hey, I believe Facebook pages can be like running another blog. I do have time for either right now.
I have heard of edgerank, but I do not know anything about it. The way people interact on regular Faceboook, I would call it a waste of time to have a page unless it is business related.
A few things for you Michael.
First, not sure you’ve noticed that your comments always go to the spam filter first. That’s because the comment policy shows that if there’s more than 2 words in your name it’s going to spam. Just wanted you to know in case one day I miss one of your comments in the spam filter.
Second, I kind of just told you what Edgerank is. lol I’d agree with you that those pages are more for business, although some people create them to post their blog articles or anything else they want to share with people who like those particular things. I’d never call any of that a waste of time, though it might be for you.
Third, blogging and Facebook pages are what they are for each user, depending on your purpose. Not having time to do it works for you if your income isn’t dependent on you, if you know what I mean. As an independent business person for 11 years, I consider it an important part of my marketing efforts. And since it costs me nothing except a little bit of time, I’d be a fool not to take it seriously, with almost a billion people using the site.
Mitch, you look at some very interesting points of SMO. For sure business pages may help to increase traffic. As I have mentioned several times, this depends on the niche and on content that is syndicated. I have nearly abandon the strategy of business page promotion for few of my websites as traffic is close to nothing – no more than 40-50 visits a week. I use groups more often and technically my whole personal profile promote my main project, so I think this is my strategy twist that gives me optimal results.
Carl, I’m not so sure it’s niche anymore. My niche isn’t all that popular amongst the masses and yet I showed a nice increase. I think even a top flight niche FB page would suffer if they put hardly any content on it. I think it’s actually more about engagement and about consistency of some sort; I’m certainly out to prove that.
Another good point, Mitch and I think you are on the right course as I see you are seeking more engagement with some trendy topics, pictures and videos that are not related to your niche. Probably you are right, I also see increase of traffic in the last few days, actually not exactly but I see increase on time spend on my websites from social networks, previously bounce rate was much higher.
Sometimes, I treat my pages as just extensions of my main profile, sometimes they are just mirrors, and sometimes I wouldn’t even know the difference.
Thing is, I am not really promoting my pages as most facebookers do. Maybe because they were not really business pages, but more of vanity pages.
Besides, I am not really the type who would stand up on one street corner and cry “Hear ye! Hear ye!” Unless of course, I got something really exciting I want everyone to know.
As you said Roy, you put up vanity pages, which means you didn’t have a business purpose for them. I do, thus I have a reason for wanting to increase my audience as much as possible. If I didn’t think I had something to offer the world I probably wouldn’t bother.
You know what I find funny (and annoying at times), is that there some who do not have any pages and instead their main profile is their business page. Come to think of it, I’m friends with some of these businesses lol!
I’ve always wondered how they do that Roy, but I’ve seen it here and there. Maybe they create the personal pages then block everything so they don’t have to deal with personal stuff.
So, uh, Mitch, I’m one of those people that don’t have an overly active FB page. If you’ve liked it; please don’t un-like it. I’m just behind in managing stuff.
Also, I don’t really like FB and I only have my business pages because I was advised to do so. Thanks for sharing this information.
Marcie, I’ll tell you the truth. I looked at your page, didn’t see much there, and thus didn’t like it; you know what I mean. lol I’ve dropped a lot of pages over the past couple of weeks because folks weren’t saying or doing anything with them. When I started my strategy, I decided to rely on those pages that were engaging others in some fashion so that I could promote them by sharing, which also helps my site. I guess I look at it like this; what kind of time does it take to add one thing to a Facebook page every couple of days at the least?
I believe Facebook has a number of likes when its about non-business but whenever you talk about business the likes and shares drop considerably. And I agree to you Mitch, we have to keep on posting new things and content on our business page, I think this is a very common thing, no one likes to see old things over and over again.
True Peter, although I think that one could post something after an hour and overwhelmingly people won’t know it’s a repeat.
Hey Mitch
I’m guilty of doing very little on my Facebook business page. I concentrate on Twitter and Google+ and then mostly forget about Facebook.
Thanks for the reminder I need to care of my Facebook page a lot more!
No problem Tim; that’s why I’m here. lol
I haven’t posted anything on my page in a while (well, that’s because I have shut it down, I am still waiting to launch my new fan page, so that I can un publish my current one).
Edge rank, oh yes. For some time, I was confused with all this stuff, especially on how I should market on FB. And after some reading, I did find my answer – images.
I did get good results with images (I got more results with my first “blog interview” that I conducted on my fan page – that was a hit, and I got lot of responses from that). The effect stayed on pretty well, with more people participating and interacting with the posts (I posted at least once a day with a tip in the images).
It’s all great. Thanks to the images 😉
Thank you for the post, Mitch!
No problem Jeevan. I wouldn’t ever consider shutting down my FB business page unless I was leaving FB for good. However, I have shut down a couple of groups for lack of participation.
Hi Mitch
I am not doing anything good to my facebook and twitter accounts. I am really involved in my blog too much, preparing the content etc. Could not pay attention to facebook.
Thanks for reminding that.
Regards
Sapna
Sapna, it’s not for everyone. However, keeping your eyes open for free opportunities to help spread your influence is never a bad thing, especially on a site with nearly a billion people on it.
Hey Mitch,
didnt know about the edgerank so something new i learnt here. anyway my facebook page hasnt done much for my business. well maybe its coz i dont post so often. but what i’ve realized is that people tend to get more attracted towards info-graphics than simple status updates. it has to be fun tho.
Actually Danny, initially it seemed like images were what drove people to one’s business page. Lately I’ve noticed that if I write a freeform post, no images, no links, that suddenly I have at least 100 people seeing it. No idea why but it’s been working lately.
I do have a facebook business page and non business page. i frequently update my non business page and i get more like on it. But for my business fb page the like are not improving. Thank Mitch Mitchell for this post, From now i will update fresh content on my business Fb page also.
It can’t hurt Paige. And one more recommendation is that now it seems that Facebook will share your submissions on your business page with more people if it’s pure text. They just keep changing their own rules.
Hi, I have Facebook account but I am not doing anything good to my facebook account. I concentrate on Twitter and Google and then mostly forget about Facebook. Thanks for reminding that.
No problem; I hope when you decide to do something that it helps you out some.
I also have a facebook page for my business and one for my personal use. I do update my personal page but my business page is not very active. After reading this article I think know what to do. Thanks for this article.
My brother runs a business for which he has a facebook page. He hardly updates it. I keep reminding him but he doesn’t update it. Initially when he started that page, he got some business from it. But now since he doesn’t update it, he doesn’t get much leads from there.
Mariah, one can lose one’s spirit when suddenly you’re not getting much from one of those pages; I’ll admit to that.