Following a Page on Facebook? Seeing What you Want?

I posted this status to the Facebook page for my child abuse site today. It’s a site with over 1,000 fans, yet not one of those newsfeeds showed a recent post to the page.

I posted a link here about 4 hours ago, and according to Facebook analytics, exactly no one was shown that post in their newsfeed. Facebook puts things in your newsfeed based on their own algorithm, if seeing things from this page is important to you, be sure to show Facebook it is important by interacting with the page. Comments, shares, likes, etc. all signal to Facebook that you want to see what is posted to this page. They also signal to others that the subject is important to you, opening up the possibility that they would find information here that might be beneficial to them as well.

Alternatively, go to the website and see all of the other ways you can follow the site, by email, RSS, Twitter or Google+. Don’t just let Facebook decide what is important to you.

I think this is pretty much proof positive that Facebook pages are losing their appeal. I’ve had Facebook pages for my sites, and even created new ones for my Sports and Photography sections, but beyond giving people a way to share the blogs and follow the blogs on their social network of choice, I don’t see a lot of benefit from them. Luckily, I’m not investing any money in those pages or trying to make money from those pages. I think it’s somewhat dishonest of Facebook to have over 1,000 people indicate that they want to see the posts from a page by liking it, and turn around and not show it to them. But it’s their playground, they can do what they like. That’s why I keep my home base right here, in my playground, accessible to anyone who wants to visit the site, or use other tools to follow it.

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