Love it or hate it, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is here to stay. What’s EdgeRank? It’s that annoying Facebook-controlled tendency for not all the things you post to your brand’s Facebook page to not show up in the feed of everyone who has liked your page.
In fact, most of the people who liked your page will probably not see your page’s updates. How crappy is that? You can shell out some cash and pay Facebook to extend your updates’ reach, but there’s another way—a better and cheaper (i.e., free) way.
You want the people who have liked your page to get a little red notification at the top of their Facebook page. That’s the goal. When people have that option turned on, it doesn’t matter so much if your update doesn’t appear in people’s news feeds because they’re seeing that annoying little red notification icon. You can’t avoid that.
To get that notification, encourage your Facebook fans/likers/whatever-we’re-calling-them-these-days-ers to do the following (and this is assuming that they’ve already “Liked” your page on Facebook):
Step 1: Navigate to your Facebook page.
Step 2: Hover the mouse cursor over the “Liked” button until a little dropdown menu appears. Enable the “Get Notifications” option, like so:
And that’s it!
Write up a brief blurb on your Facebook page that encourages the people who like your page to also get those notifications. Once you’ve done that, you might want to consider 1) pinning that blurb to the top of your Facebook page, and 2) shelling out some dough and promoting that blurb so that more of your audience sees it.
You can learn more about EdgeRank here. You can follow me (Tristan) on Twitter here and follow Osmosio on Twitter here. I tweet about random interesting stuff I find online. The Osmosio account only tweets out great articles relating to digital publishing.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Great tip Tristan, though, of course, this involves a bit more work than simply sharing and, I suspect, if Facebook isn’t careful, might lead to fewer shares overall. If the driving force of Facebook has to do with sharing, then making it harder to do may well be the social network’s downfall.
I agree, I think that making it harder for people and businesses to spread their content is short-sighted on the part of Facebook. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out in the long run.
Hey Tristan,
I just did this for two of my clients and started up a small promoted post for it (at $5).
I took a screencap, like you said, and included the steps + reasons to follow (such as that they share coupon codes and other helpful resources); I’ll try to get back to ya with the results in a few days (if I remember).
Oh, by the way, I went ahead and ran one of these – and got some reports.
Basically, seeing double impressions on the client pages now. Went from an average 50ish views to about 100 – 110 per post now and it’s been staying consistent since running the image and promoted post.
Good stuff.
That’s freaking awesome :)
Hi Tristan,
Thanks for the info. I am new to the facebook and blogging world. I was a bit ticked off when I found out that my facebook posts were not reaching the people who have liked my page. I thought that was the idea behind getting them to like my page so they could see my updates!! I have done some paid advertsing on facebook and I will try your method –
P.S. Here is a tip I discovered by trial and error – I found that when I run my fracebook ad between about 6:00 PM and 8:00 AM I get a lot more bang for my buck. I run a $5.00 max per day ad and a $5.00 Max per day post promotion (which is usually a link to my company blog post) but I don’t activate the campaign until about 6:00pm and I pause the ad at about 8:00AM. The reason is I was running the ad 24/7 with a higher per day $ amount but I was not getting very good results (likes). It seems people are more likely to like stuff at night rather than during the day!! Im sure there is a way to automate the schedule but like I said – Im new!
Yeah, I was not a happy camper when I realized that my posts weren’t reaching everyone who liked the page.
That’s really interesting that you’re seeing more likes in the evening like that. Hmmm. That’s something I’ll definitely have to try.
Thanks Jim!