Recently I’ve had a few business owners and non-profit groups asking me why their blogs or other  updates on Facebook pages don’t  show up on fans news feeds.  The main reason is this.  Facebook decides what makes it to news feeds through an algorithm that is somewhat random but is informed by your own interactions with other user’s pages. Plus it also posts the most current content, so within a few hours it’s easy for your update/important blog post to be buried under a barrage of baby updates, links to bizarre crap on Youtube or other senseless musings. Essentially it gives preferential treatment to the pages and friends you interact with most and whatever is newest, unlike an RSS feed which is how many businesses have misinterpreted it. This means that if your Facebook fans and friends aren’t actively visiting your page then you may potentially risk falling off the radar so to speak.

What you can do to keep interaction going? Some of these may seem obvious but I’ve been amazed at how many companies don’t do these simple things:

Add favorites to your page. This is a two way street. If you add other organizations and businesses to your favorites there’s always the chance that they’ll reciprocate and sometimes if a big on reciprocates it can create a lot of attention for you. Think of it like outbound and inbound links. While you do risk adding an organization or company’s page without reciprocity (this risk now being termed as preciprocity) nothing ventured nothing gained is what I say.

In recognizing that the things you post to you own page won’t always make it to everyone’s news feed, when you do have something that’s particularly important use the send an update to fans option on your page.  The frequency at which you use this function is up to you but I know some communications specialists who like to treat it like a monthly newsletter function. In fact, some of them have a monthly newsletter that they will use the update function on their Facebook page to send out along with their mailing list. If you only have quarterly newsletters then consider having one particularly strong blog post every month that you update your fans and followers with. Then maybe consider having a condensed newsletter post that invites your friends and followers to download the full version from your site when the quarterly comes out. To get to this option go to EDIT PAGE and then on the right hand side in the edit mode you’ll see the option to send an update to fans.

Consider a Facebook newsfeed widget on your site. If you post all your blog content to Facebook plus your Twitter feed then this is an easy way to aggregate content from them and can increase the visits to your Facebook page and blog at the same time. Although in my opinion it’s better to have people visiting your site through Facebook and Twitter as opposed to the other way around. Nevertheless, if you want to utilize Facebook more effectively this is something to consider.

These are just a couple of ways you can use Facebook in conjunction with your blog more effectively.