Facebook’s Pages Feed
Today marked the first time I saw the Pages Feed that I first mentioned last week on the right hand-side of my Facebook Newsfeed page. As you know, I’ve been looking forward to see if this might be a way to increase the reach of Facebook pages, although I seriously have my doubts, because I don’t think most people do more than look at their Newsfeed. I don’t think most people even realize that Facebook is filtering their newsfeed, nor do they realize that it doesn’t show the latest posts at the top by default. I don’t hold out much hope that making users look at a secondary feed for the Pages they like is going to be a magic bullet to increase a pages reach.
Still, they were putting it out there as a peace offering to page owners, so I wanted to see it for myself. A couple of things stand out to me after spending some time looking at it:
1. It is not sorted by recent posts on top. It is obviously using Facebook’s Top Stories algorithm, and there is no option to switch to showing the posts in “Most Recent First”.
2. I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled through close to 100 posts on my Pages Feed. I did not see a single solitary post that was delivered via RSS Graffiti or Networked Blogs. Obviously, the auto-posting of your own content is frowned upon within Facebook’s algorithm. I suspected as much when I looked at the very low reach numbers for that sort of post on my own page, but this really confirmed for me that there’s almost no point in using these tools on Facebook. Your content isn’t reaching anyone that way.
3. I do, however, see many of the posts I’ve sent to Facebook via IFTTT. The algorithm seems to like things coming from there slightly more than using tools designed specifically to post to Facebook. Yeah, if I were the folks working on Networked Blogs or RSS Graffiti, I’d be pissed.
So, I’m thinking it’s time to disable RSS Graffiti, and try using IFTTTÂ for my own content instead of just things I save to Diigo, which is how I use it now. We’ll see how well that works, or if I have to resort to manually posting each new blog post to Facebook manually. If it comes down to that, I may just take a look at really not doing much with the Facebook page any longer, for the same reasons that Mark Cuban laid out this week.
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