It was fabulous back in the good old days before Facebook went public. But bit by bit, Facebook is becoming an increasingly less effective organizing tool. And this is very bad news for people like me who rely on it to promote clients for a living.
It seems that every time I log in, Facebook has ratcheted down its effectiveness, removed a feature or is now charging a fee for something they used to offer freely.
First they made it impossible to invite all of your friends at once into an event invitation — requiring you to tediously click on each friend’s photo in order to invite them into a new event.
Then, Facebook changed it’s algorithms so that our friend’s posts would not appear on our feeds unless it deems them our “best friends.” This has made newsfeeds shorter and seemingly with the same ten friends posting all the time.
Then in September 2012, Facebook, without fanfare, suddenly reduced the exposure of your posts to only 15% of your fan base unless you pay them to promote the post to fans. For food journalist Dianne Jacob, that means just to ensure her regular posts get read by all of her fans will now cost her $11,000 a year!
Recently, Facebook administrators were horrified when their reach statistics suddenly dropped off a cliff. This of course, stimulated many of us to crank up the Facebook ad campaigns so we could show our clients the same statistics they were used to seeing. It’s insulting to me when a client is paying twice as much to Facebook for ads as they are paying a live human being to create content and manage the page.
As journalist and author Charles Shaw said: “They have intentionally shut down our pages. For months, we’ve been posting to a narrow niche of our “closest friends”. It seems it was engineered specifically to help shut down the organizing in Egypt and Occupy Wall Street.”
Well, maybe.
Ever since Facebook had an IPO, they have been looking for every possible avenue to squeeze a buck out of the 2 billion users of this “free” service.
So how do you work around these obstacles?
Here are my tricks:
1. Keep multiple pages.
I have multiple Facebook identities. While this is technically against Facebook’s rules, it gives you the ability to log out and log in to different profiles when inviting fans to an Event or loading up a client’s page with new friends. This keeps you from appearing to be a spammer. It doesn’t solve the problem of posts only reaching 15% of your friends, but if you have five pages, and post the same post to all five, you are at least increasing your edge rank by cross posting from one page to the next.
2. Use multiple administrators
By having several administrators on your page, you also get more reach from the posts. Make sure the admins all spread posts to their personal pages as well, which will help increase the virality of your posts and make sure they get seen by more than 15% of your fans.
3. Post more frequently.
Once a day is not enough. I recommend 3-5 times a day, at intervals that coincide with peak usage times — first thing in the morning, lunch time, after dinner, Saturday and Sunday mornings, late at night to catch those insomniacs and during snowstorms and other times when people are inside and online. By posting five times, and repeating your posts, you increase the chance that all of your network will see your posts.
4. “Like” as many posts and pages as possible.
This triggers Facebook’s algorithms to bring friends into your feed more frequently.
5. Share your posts into your friend’s and employee’s pages — or cross post them into groups. Or cross-syndicate your posts via WordPress.
This helps build your reach and restore the statistics you used to get before without taking this extra step.
Sorry, Facebook, but your short sighted greed is probably responsible for the surge in growth of other social networks lately.
7. Use the “Facebook invite all friends” code.
There are dozens of workarounds that enable you to invite all of your friends into an event invitation or page without tediously clicking on each friend’s profile. There is a snippet of HTML code and instructions on this workaround lurking on the Internet.
8. Use Friend pages instead of Fan pages.
If you are a musician, author, band, filmmaker, consultant, workshop leader, etc. build your following using a regular page and avoid using Fan pages because your personal page has better reach. For the time being, you can have up to 4,999 friends in a personal page before Facebook forces you to start a Fan page. Many musicians and public figures I know are building multiple personal pages and avoiding Fan pages and have two personal pages instead.
Do you have any tips and tricks to work around the new restrictions in Facebook? If so, please let me know.
Related articles
- 10 Steps to Create a Facebook Page that Gets “Likes” (forbes.com)
- Graph Search: You might just ‘like’ Facebook’s new search tool – Detroit Free Press (freep.com)
Giselle Bisson Visibility Shift 
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