Why Facebook if Most Fans Won’t See?

This is something that we see a lot where people set up a fan Page and then they want to promote different aspects of their business and they use the wall as their method to get the word out. The reality is Facebook has an algorithm called EdgeRank that determines what actually gets shown to whom. The basic way of looking at that is every single post that you put out on your wall gets a post quality score. If you have a low post quality score, it doesn’t make it to very many people.

The fundamental things that influence your post quality scores has to do with the number of interactions you’re getting on your post, so how many likes, how many comments, how many shares, and then, of course, the element of time, so how many of those are occurring really close to each other. Is the number of interactions continuing on a post, thereby making it relevant to keep in the newsfeed, and all of those elements.

The key things that people do not interact with are related to self-promotion. If you have a large fan base, you can sometimes even be lured into thinking you’re doing a good job if you’re getting 500 comments on something. But if you’ve got over 2 million fans, that’s actually a really poor interaction rate. So what we tell people is that the Wall is really a place for you to build a sense of community with your fans. And it’s really a place for your fans to be able to interact with you and for you to be able to interact back with them in non-promotional sort of ways. Then what you want to do in order to reach your fans in any sort of a scalable way is use advertising. You can take out ads that target only your existing fans–the number one reason people become fans is to take advantage of promotional offers.

There was a great study done by DDB where they surveyed thousands of fans across six different countries. The majority of participants said they joined your Page because they are looking to get offers from you. So make sure that your fans see targeted ads—take them to a landing tab where there’s an opportunity for them to be able to share this out with their friends, and that’s the best way to get into the news feed. Thus, you are using their news feed to get yourself promotional posts to have a high-enough post quality score. – Justin Kistner via HubSpot