So you’re on your favorite shopping site or foodie blog and you click on their little Facebook icon to like their page. You swim on over to Facebook and happily click LIKE on their page. You dream about all the cool posts you’re going to see everyday in your news feed. Delicious pastry pics and how to videos. Cute clothes on sale that make you look good even after that holiday inch. But to your confusion, no posts in your news feed the next day. None the week after that either. What the what!? Has your favorite foodie blogger stopped updating their FB page? NOPE! You’re just not seeing their posts.
Facebook has become the pusher man that Nancy Reagan warned us about. The guys in the scraggly beard and torn jeans that say, “The first one’s free”, knowing full well you’ll be back before sunset for your 10th one. Today, Facebook requires that businesses pay to have their posts seen on your feed. Now of course they will deny this. They claim there’s just so much competition for your limited news feed real estate that some posts just don’t make the cut off. Malarkey! Business pages are always given the option to click the little BOOST icon on their posts to help increase views….for a price of course. Without that extra step, many of your business posts will never see the faces of their much anticipating audiences.
Of course, some posts do get through. But not nearly as many as should. But if you take a peek at your page sometime, you’ll notice that ironically tons of those “sponsored” ads manage to get through just fine. So you do the math.
So what can I do you say? Let your customers know that they can always click on the little sad ORANGE FLAG that says Pages Feed on the left side of their Facebook page (screen shot pictured above). That will show them a tailored news feed that consists only of pages they’ve liked. Also, upping the amount of posts you publish can help increase your odds of getting 1 through on Liker’s news feeds. I mean, math again. And of course you can always just pony up the dough.
Remember, all is not lost. Twitter and Instagram are still great avenues for free press…for now at least.