Facebook has rolled out a new feature called “Instant Replies”. Instant replies allows Page owners to write, save and re-use automated replies to messages when communicating with customers on Facebook. This feature allows Page admins to create two canned replies to messages. The first for outside business hours, called the away mode…
Facebook Business Page Reach or the lack of has long been a hot topic among business owners. Over the years a lot of business owners have said that their Facebook Reach is down and they are finding it harder to get their content in front of fans. Many also state that it’s because Facebook is deliberatly making them pay to advertise. Well Brian Boland, who leads the Ads Product Marketing team at Facebook has written a Blog post all about why.
To sum up the two key points:
At any one time there are on average 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log on to Facebook. For those with a lot of friends and Page likes this can be as many as 15,000. As a result, competition in a users News Feed, the place on Facebook where they view content from their family and friends, as well as businesses is increasing, and it’s becoming increasingly harder for any story to gain exposure in News Feed.
An infographic by SumoCoupon shows what Facebook’s billion-plus users do in the average minute, such as share 3.2 million posts, send 150,000 messages and upload 243,000 photos.
Rather than showing all possible content and flooding your Feed, the News Feed is designed to show the content that’s most relevant to them. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see when they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story using EdgeRank. EdgeRank basically looks at thousands of factors relative to each person and determines what is most relevant to them. Over the past year, Facebook have made some important changes to how EdgeRank works and what content it chooses to display in your news Feed.
As a result of these changes, News Feed is becoming more engaging, even as the amount of content being shared on Facebook continues to grow.
The next questions is:
Facebook say No.
“Our goal is always to provide the best experience for the people that use Facebook. We believe that delivering the best experiences for people also benefits the businesses that use Facebook. If people are more active and engaged with stories that appear in News Feed, they are also more likely to be active and engaged with content from businesses.”
As always, producing good quality content that people want to read, like and share will increase your Facebook Reach.
Blogging involves not just writing good copy but also using good imagery.
Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog. They also catch attention when people share your post on Facebook or other social media platforms. This is all very well but good photography doesn’t come cheap and if you are paying for images from Royalty free sites like fotolia.com then it can quickly add up.
Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast.
Enter Compfight. Compfight searches Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use and even provides you with the HTML code for proper attribution.
There’s a good FAQ guide and link to the Flickr Creative Commons licence page so you can fully understand how the licences work and what your rights are and how to use the images.
Facebook announced last week (23rd August) that they are making changes to the News Feed Algorithm (EdgeRank) which should reduce the number of “Click Like if you love cats” or crappy memes you see in your News Feed.
Facebook’s aim is to make sure that the best quality content is being produced, surfaced and shared. Their latest update to the News Feed ranking algorithm helps ensure that the organic content people see from Pages they are connected to is the most interesting to them.
“While the goal of News Feed is to show high quality posts to people, we wanted to better understand what high quality means. To do this we decided to develop a new algorithm to factor into News Feed.
To develop it, we first surveyed thousands of people to understand what factors make posts from Pages high quality.
Some of the questions we asked included:”
Once they had the results in they developed a new Facebook algorithm, and then tested it with a small segment of their users and found:
These results suggest that this change shows more people higher quality content, and more interesting stories from the Pages they are connected to and Facebook will be rolling out this update to everyone over the next few weeks.
If your Facebook posts consist mainly of begging for likes or memes then yes, the changes to the Facebook Algorithm will affect you. You will probably see a reduction in your reach, but if you continue to provide good quality content that people want to read and engage with then no, it will be business as usual.
Nested comment replies on Facebook Business Pages are here!
What a lovely surprise was in store when we logged in this morning. Facebook have enabled nested replies on our page. This is a feature we have been waiting a long time for. It’s always been difficult replying to a specific comment if someone else has also commented and your reply would get lost. Now you can reply to specific comments and Facebook will nest them, and bring active conversations to the top.
This is what the Facebook help page says about them:
Now, replies are shown below the comments, so it’s clear who’s responding to which comment. The most active conversations are shown at the top, and comments marked as spam are moved to the bottom.
Have you checked your page yet to see if it’s rolled out yet?