Tag: Facebook Pages

Are you finding that your fan engagement has dropped on Facebook? If you have under 1,000 fans most likely your activity has dropped or come to a crashing halt on your Facebook Business Page. Why? This study may shed some interesting insight in regards to what is happening to the traffic on your Facebook Business Page.

“Pages with less than 1,000 fans saw a decrease in engagement. Pages with more than 1,000 fans saw a steady  increase in engagement, right up to Pages with over 100,000 fans, which saw a 27.8% increase in the rate of engagement.”

“When you consider how the news feed now works, with the vast amount of  content and updates being shared, it is evident why the number of fans will  become more important. You need a higher number to increase the chances of your  content being found.” Read the full article and see the graphs.

So far in our testing on engagement levels including likes, comments, and interaction, we are seeing a marked decrease in participation and exposure for the 22 clients that we are monitoring since the changes. Although our testing and monitoring is not over yet, what we see it important in regards to how businesses may want to consider using Facebook in the future.

“The study from Edgerank Checker has found that over a sample of over 5,800 random Pages, 82% experienced a reduction in the amount of impressions on the Page.”

Yikes, that is scary. Your content, that you are working so hard to create for Facebook users, is getting lost in the noise. It appears that a standard two updates a day that many were using (to prevent spamming readers) in this new world on Facebook, will mean that your message gets lost in the shuffle. However if your users are on Facebook enough, they will see your content appear in the
right sidebar ticker, so take heart.

I personally am predicting a strong push from Facebook to move businesses into their pay per  click program. If you are interested in trying Facebook advertising. I invite you to review all Facebook our service offerings.

Facebook has slowly dismantled the things that have made Facebook Business Pages a great resource for a business to have. In September and October Facebook has disabled these features.

No longer can you use these two important items on Facebook if you are a business:

• Cannot send out a note to all your fans using the Facebook message system
• Cannot have a forum like exchange on the discussion tab – discussions are removed too
• Did away with the Facebook reviews tab
• Serious changes to contest and “like” building strategies – many things are now off limits

Some of these features went away as of September 30th and others on October 31st, and I have to tell you I think more changes are in store.

Additionally, fans now can block all your updates from their pages. In fact, unless they subscribe to your updates on their wall they may actually never see what you have talked about or shared through default Facebook settings.

For businesses these very important changes have removed the value of a “like” on Facebook. Additionally, Facebook is now allowing anyone, not just fans, to post on your business wall. So now someone doesn’t even need to “like” your business to have their comments posted as it was before.

You may still force people to “like” your page with a fan gate for the time being, but this will probably change as well. In conclusion, before a “like” really had value – you could additionally market fans with coupon codes and messages all within Facebook; building relevancy and a reason for someone to actually “like” your business. With the changes that are being rolled out it sure seems like the value of a Facebook “like” has lost its value.

This past week I saw something really wild and wanted to share it with you. I saw that in a Google Places site reviews had been picked up from Facebook of all places. Wow that is big news!

We are going to put the pieces of this puzzle together for you and need your help to do it!

Now, what I am not sure of is if you create a FBML page and add your website reviews there will the reviews be picked up or is Google only picking up reviews from people using the Facebook Business Page reviews app. If I had to guess I would say from the application.

As I do additional testing this week on how reviews from Facebook are picked up; meaning if I can ascertain whether you can simply add your own website reviews or if other Facebook users have to review you while they are logged in to their own accounts, I will make sure to let you know at Facebook. In the mean time, this is exactly what we are going to do to test and I sure would appreciate it if you can help us out on this one.

1. I am going to create a tab in one of my Facebook Business Page accounts and load a sampling of my website reviews to the new FBML page I will create. I will even try to have the reviews coded using Google’s hReview tags. You can visit my page here. While you are there make sure to like this business page that I am testing on as I will only send out a note of success or failure through Facebook to fans. This is not my main Facebook page but one I have created to make sure I hold onto my business name.
2. I am going to turn on the application for Facebook reviews in my main Facebook Business page account and solicit reviews from clients on that page. If you are not already a fan, make sure to like this page as I will also only be sending out the results to fans of this page. You need only fan one page to get the actual results.

So check out the two pages, look in the left nav bar for the reviews link, like the page, and if you want leave a friendly review. Then when I can see what is going on I will send the results out via Facebook to all of our fans at both pages.

Thanks for your help in advance, this could be a great mini whitepaper!

My understanding of what people want from a Facebook Business Page is changing over time as we get feedback and interaction from colleagues, fans, and clients. Here are a few things that I have learned and am still doing testing on our own Business Page.

• People are thirsty to connect with a person. Too much selling information or focus on your own services is a real no-no.
• People want to have personal tidbits about you. Although you do not want nor have to reveal a lot of personal information about yourself on a Facebook Business Page. People do want to know who they talk to on the phone. They love to see photos to “know” who you are.
• Fans and visitors love humor. A funny video, joke, quote, or funny photo can really elicit a positive response.
• Asking questions and taking polls can engage visitors and clients.
• Commenting back on a thread on your Business wall is a must. Make sure that fans and visitors see that you are interacting with what they write.

For us, we are testing and having fun with a new concept of engagement using our spokesdog. It is not hard nor time consuming to put a little bit of “personal” juice behind your Facebook posts. Remember people who are visiting you are used to the personal interaction from their own personal page on Facebook, your Business Page needs to reflect and feed this need to get the best response from your visitors.