Since 2013, I have been enjoying working on a Facebook page of a fashion brand. When I started off, I had no idea about the kind of technical analysis and effort that goes into running such a page. No, it isn’t just about posting an update and replying to all the comments.
I made mistakes, and I learnt a lot from it. In fact, I learned some things that I think only an experienced person would have discovered so far about this social media giant. Not everyone understands how Facebook works when it comes to business pages. Not everyone knows how the algorithm works and how the ads work.
While there are many documentation and blogs you can find out about using Facebook pages the right way, I think the things that I learnt are quite different. Note that they may not be entirely accurate for all but for me, they are the results of my experiments and all my social media efforts on this site are driven by those findings.
Today I am going to share those five things that I learnt using this social media site and running different kinds of Facebook pages for various types of brands. Again, they may not be technically correct but for me they are.
1.Your post will never reach someone’s timeline unless
If you think that you will post an excellent update on your page, and all your fans would get to see it, you’re very wrong. Your post would hardly reach 10% of those fans. The organic reach is so little. In fact, 10% is also a colossal number. You can say that your post would almost reach nobody.
But people do see different posts on their timelines. How does that happen then? In two ways. One way is that you boost the post. This way you will set targetting where you will mention the country, age group, gender and interests that you want to tap. The people who match the set criteria would be able to see your post. You can also set it up in a way to make people who already like your page and their friends see your posts.
Another way is simple but tough. When a person likes your page, there are high chances he/she would never see your page posts again. But if that person visits your page, scrolls down some posts, likes and comments on them, then the chances of your future posts reaching his timeline increase.
So, these are the only two ways people get to see your posts. Else, it is you alone on your Facebook page thinking of maybe you’re posting something wrong. No, you’re not wrong. You’re just working on a money-hungry platform.
2. All Facebook cares about is money
Apart from the routine updates from the friends, this social media ruler refuses to let pages enjoy the same kind of treatment. Of course, they say it stops brands from spamming the users. Does it? Asking the brands to spend money on increasing their page reach is a way to curb spam?
Now, if you own a brand page, you must know that no matter how hard you try, how awesome content you post, your future still depends on how much money you pay to Facebook. Stop blaming yourself for doing boring jobs. They just don’t reach people because Fb doesn’t want that.
3. They keep changing prices for boost for particular keywords
I have never seen an official announcement from Facebook telling that they have changed the pricing structure. Maybe I missed all of them since 2013. Let me know if I did. But don’t you think that’s cheating?
One day your expected post reach for the same kind of target keywords and the audience is 15000 and next it is 1500. That’s a hell of a big change to not notice. I noticed that. And it feels you’re being cheated. At least, they can just inform us.
How am I supposed to tell my boss why the post is reaching fewer people? What proof can I give him to believe me? Well, that supports my second point again – all they care about is money.
4. They do not care how good you’re
Do I even need to talk about this? How many posts go viral in a month? Now subtract the jobs that used paid boosts. What’s the number you can guess? I bet it would be very very low. Go on and do the research and you would see.
Your post quality doesn’t matter. No matter what you do, it all boils down to how much money you spend on the boost. Of course, ordinary people or the non-page owners don’t see the boost stats but those who have been into managing social media for long can quickly tell whether a post has been boosted or not.
5. Page boost is useless
This is just a tip I learnt and wanted to share with people who do run social media campaigns on Facebook. Now, Facebook provides two options for advertisements on the page. Either you can promote your page for more likes, or you can promote your post. When you promote your page, all you get is likes. That person who likes your page might not even visit your page and engage with it. That means you do get the likes, but there are very small chances that those fans would ever hear from you again.
When you do a post boost, you get engagement on your page. That increases the chances of those people hearing from you again. Also, if there’s a link to the post you promoted, you can drive traffic to your