I was looking at my most popular posts in the past month, and one that jumped out at me was the one I wrote about a Quiet Facebook Change most people don’t even know about. By looking at the amount of views that one post got, I wanted to follow up on the topic as a lot of you are obviously interested. Thanks for the many many retweets as well.
Facebook changes all the time, frustrating many people, but I am not here to complain. I am here to help you and me use the service to make connections that will lead people to our businesses. So…
What do you mean invisible?
Your posts to Facebook have recently gotten a new screening process. For a while your feeds would show you either Top News (basically whatever got the most action in your stream), or All News (the complete list of what your friends did in chronological order). They made a subtle change recently and now your news stream is automatically set to show you the posts of people in your friends list that you Engage with. That means Ted from high school, who you haven’t exchanged any Facebook love with in the past 2 years, will no longer show up in your stream. You may or may not like that, but overwhelmingly most people I have heard from do not… but we still need to adjust.
As Mashable put it:
Facebook’s News Feed, however, is driven based on algorithms that take into account previous engagement and your social graph.
‘We could always hide an individual we did not want to see, why would Facebook do this?‘ is a very common response. The bottom line is most likely irrelevant to us, we are not changing it. Facebook gave us a way to undo it and that means either you know or you don’t. But let’s face it, the vast majority of people are living with this filter and don’t know it.
How does this Affect my Marketing?
If you don’t Engage, you are invisible on Facebook. If you don’t build a connection, you are invisible on Facebook. If you don’t consistently and proactively go out and make an effort to engage the people in your network, you are invisible on Facebook. You can post the most amazing content, and be unseen.
The Plan:
You need to change the way you are doing things if you are using Facebook as a broadcasting medium. It isn’t anymore. Here are some bullet points to consider:
- Under No Circumstance let a friend of your page reach out to you and go un-responded to. This is the easiest form of engagement to accomplish, they made the first move. Follow through or you really don’t belong running any social marketing. One way to make sure you never miss this is to get a Professional Social Dashboard like Spoke Social (affiliate) that puts all your incoming social messages from all your accounts into one inbox. Like email you can go through and respond from one place.
- Change your feed to show you everyone, and make sure to scan through it on a regular basis (daily) and make comments on things that are appropriate for you to comment on. This will allow you to be engaged with all the people you comment on. Keeping them fresh in your stream (and Facebook’s eyes)
- Acknowledge Birthdays, Facebook gives you this information on a Silver platter, by reaching out to people on their birthday you are not out of place at all. Do this and reap the benefit of being in tune with your networks lives, and of being engaged with them.
- Ask Questions that Drive Engagement, if you address your community with questions on a regular basis you will see a great amount of engagement. As you ask more and more you will find a groove that gets people talking, live in that groove. See this example I did Yesterday:
See what I mean?
Those are four of the best ways to make this engagement happen. Do you have any thoughts or other ideas to drive engagement on Facebook? I would love to hear.
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I am Spirocks on Twitter.