guys. i knew this was happening.
i knew that while my “Facebook Fans” grow,
the number of people that actually can see my posts still remain in the <10% range.
it’s nuts. and quite honestly, it’s making me want to forget facebook altogether,
but since no one will leap with me, here we all are, trapped.
and like my friend george here, we are only… kind of smiling at our facebook numbers…
if i just post content and no one interacts with me, no one sees the post but a small small few. facebook has designed it so only after lots of likes and shares will anyone see it. they want {ridiculous amounts of} money to advertise so more will see the post… and though i have done that on a few, i haven’t in a long time and refuse to. it makes me livid to know that facebook can just flip the switch like that and screw us.
for a while, in all of my large blogger groups on facebook we were discovering the loopholes, the ways to still see a larger audience even with the algorithms. if a post has a link in it, it always got filtered tighter. facebook knows that a link means someone might click away and out of facebook, so intentionally, facebook filtered those posts out of many of your follower’s feeds. this means that bloggers and site owners would try the “link is in the comments” trick. and it worked for a while. It tricked the system to thinking it was a “text-only” post which always saw more views…
well just recently facebook announced that even text-only posts on pages would be filtered more stringently. there is certainly a strategy to when and how to post on facebook, but in a lot of ways, it is dependent on facebook and the secret killing algorithm of death.
large businesses of course have the upper hand still because a) they get more involvement anyway. larger pages means greater anonymity and people will like and comment more often {and with more fans, more will} and 2) they have the funds to pay for advertising in other ways so facebook isn’t the only draw to their site. though if they wanted to pay facebook {a dumb idea in my opinion} they could.
{this is the part where you look over to my sidebar and realize that i don’t have a million fans,
so why the big rant….?}
now, my page is still “young” for sure, but i have friends with pages that have 40,000 even 400,000 “likes”. imagine how much MORE frustrating it would be for them to see only 10% of those people viewing any of the posts they work so hard on. what a serious sham!
check this out:
on my blog’s facebook page, with over 7000 “likes” look how many see posts with only a few likes or comments… and look what facebook suggests i pay them to “boost” a single post to more people!!
now check this out:
this is my photography facebook page. i don’t push for likes much here cause i wanted the fans to come as organically as possible so that more people will be actually interested and preferably local.
this page has just over 100 “likes”.
this is why facebook is still a great place for photographers to advertise… by tagging a few people in my shoots, {people that i am usually connected to because they found me via friends or connections in the first place} i can reach lots and lots more than just my “likers”. and what’s even better is that these tagged photos post to those timelines for their friends and family to like and comment on… bringing me more interaction and views to the post. so a photography blog post, tends to do well because of facebook advertising alone, which is nice. i’m sure facebook will figure out this loophole as well soon…
of course pinterest is the #1 traffic source for almost every site now, but you know what comes in second? instagram. by a lot!
in fact, i use a great web-based site tracker called sumall. i love it. i put in all of my various social media sites and the site calculates where my traffic comes from. it includes google analytics as well, but even google analytics will not show me where a lot of the “direct links” come from since bigredclifford.com is a homepage link, they all get lumped into one category instead of tracked from the source where that link was actually clicked. turns out, lots of instagram users are getting to blogs more than they are likely to click on a link from facebook. interesting, right?
why we keep hosting huge giveaways for pinterest and facebook, i don’t know…
{be on the lookout for some great insta-giveaways soon!}
bottom line: i will stick it out, and so should you, because that’s still where the conversations happen, my real interactions with you and i do love that. but be sure if you see a post, and you like it, actually “like it”. that way the post will get seen by many more than just you. sharing posts obviously gets the word out quicker, but if you see a post you like, and want to let them know… that’s what it’s there for, only now… it’s like a tip jar. it means even more now to content creators and advertisers because it’s the ONLY way to spread the word without shelling out and selling out.
and while you’re at it, lets be friends on google+, twitter, instagram, or pinterest if you’re there. that’s where you’d rather spend time visually anyway. pinterest is obviously everyone’s favorite, and it’s a great place to advertise, google+ is becoming a favorite as well, also because there is a lot of web-power to be gained SEO-ranking-wise, and it’s just prettier to look at than facebook. and of course instagram is a fave too. so far, there hasn’t been any filtering or blocking algorithms on these other platforms and that will ultimately lead to facebook’s downfall…
it’s not like facebook is hurting for money… they can stand the break from us there all the time anyway…
i saw this video last week and he makes some very great points. he compares how facebook and youtube differ in their financial and advertizing models. quite interesting if you are trying to grow a business and plan on doing so by getting more people to “like” your facebook page.
