Where have all my views gone?

Have you noticed that suddenly you aren't being seen by as many people on your Facebook fan page? I noticed the pages I manage dropped a few weeks ago and I have been playing with different ways to get them back up since then. What I have found is that organically on most of my pages what is being seen is some where between 1/10 and 1/3 of my total fans. This is not good, especially if you rely heavy on Facebook to send traffic to your business.

Why is this happening?

Well, as you may know, Facebook is now publicly traded. What does that have to do with your page posts not being seen by as many people? Everything! Since they started being a publicly traded company and their stocks did nothing more than slowly drop, they have had to improvise how to make more money. Now you have always been able to buy ads on Facebook and they work relatively well. Up until they started trading publicly they were fairly inexpensive. Now with their focus being to drive the profits of the company up, this has all changed.

So how does this tie into your business Facebook page?

Well, what they did was adjust the algorithm for what showed up in the Newsfeed, which promptly bumped down the priority of business pages. Why would they do this? To sell more ads, silly! They are a profit driven company now, so everything they do will have to be centered around how they make money, which happens to be ads.

Right now there are 3 ways to purchase Facebook ads, through the Ads Manager, Promoted Page Posts and Promoted Personal Posts. Yes, I think personal page promoted posts are silly and I honestly think the analytics on them are horrible, but I have played with them a little bit and they do get seen by more people.

So what can you do about this change?

Well, on the Facebook Business Page side, you can promote posts or purchase ads for your page and posts. I have toyed with both and personally they each serve a different purpose with a little overlap from what I have seen.

If you are still learning how to get around on Facebook and have no clue about how the Ads manager works, then I would suggest starting with Promoted Posts. You will however have to have a certain amount of "likes" on your page first. According to the Facebook website, you have to have 400 likes before you can promote a post. But I will tell you, I have a page that was a little over 250 like and have promoted the posts on that page. So you may just have to play with it and see if it lets you promote a post if you have less than 250 likes on your business page.

I have decided to work on building a class that teaches Facebook Advertising basics, which will be launching around Thanksgiving so that you have time to grab some new business for the holidays. If you would like to keep up to date on that class you can head over to my website and sign up for my email list. This way you can keep up to date with any classes, free and paid that I may be teaching. Go here to sign up: http://www.freskosmedia.com

Facebook is a growing beast and will continue to be a challenge as it will constantly be changing. They just changed how groups look and even rolled out a new interface for the messaging system. Just remember if you need to be seen by more people on Facebook going forward, you will need to be sharing great content that makes people check your page daily or you will have to promote posts.

Try promoting a post for your business page, you can do this starting at just 5 dollars. Run a test and see if it makes any difference! When you see the difference and are ready to learn more about how to advertise on Facebook, then let me know and I will tell you where to take my next class!

I hope you have a better understanding why your post views have been declining and will keep in mind that Facebook is amazing and a growing beast, but now it is profit driven a bit. Promote a good post with a coupon or event and see how well it does vs no promotion. I think you will be surprised at the difference!

Posted Originally: http://www.freskosmedia.com/no-one-is-seeing-my-facebook-posts-facebook-marketing-for-pages/