Kimberly CastleberryThe Facebook Management Conundrum…
To use or not to use.. that is the question!
When it comes to trying to be in multiple social channels at once… it’s often a case of the less the better!
And by that, I don’t (of course) mean skipping out on vital channels but instead that we seek ways to use singular applications and tools to manage more than one at a time!
Whether the site is one that gives us analytics on multiple social sites at once (i.e. Crowdbooster.com), or one that keeps track of our community from multiple angles (i.e. Connectedhq.com) or one that lets us actively follow multiple social sites and comment, reply, post and schedule (Hootsuite.com), there’s no mistaking that these powerful tools give us leverage.
So how could this go wrong?
Recommended for YouWebcast: How to Create Content for Human Beings: A B2B Marketing Intervention
Lots of ways actually… but only one is important for this blog post! ;)
You may have heard a rustle in the crowd recently when many marketers rejoiced and declared application postings on Facebook as 100% awesome again…
Well…
They didn’t tell you the whole truth!
A little back story:
Up until very recently, posting to Facebook with any application at all (be it Instagram, Hootsuite, NetworkedBlogs, etc) that was not 100% on the freakin’ site…. would result in tumbleweeds.
By that, I mean that the posts would have minimal engagement compared to other posts made to the page “naturally”. This is to say that they were being punished by Facebook‘s all-important EdgeRank (SEO) formula or calculation.
Punished is mild they were being beat to a bloody pulp!
So recently, Facebook (after almost two years of people complaining) admitted there was a problem and fixed the calculation.
Whoopie! Jump for Joy! Right????
Well…
Only sorta….
In the middle of those two years, a second change was made to Facebook that people are forgetting to consider… “content collapse”.
Sounds like a disease… your stuff just falls over!
Honestly though, it’s when items of a similar type are “grouped” and a “read/show more” link is given to the viewer.
I’m sure you have seen these:
Let’s be honest, how often do you ever click that link to see all of them?
Me? Maybe like 0.001% of the time… once in a blue moon.
And if you don’t… why would the people following you be any different?
This impacts every single app that can post to Facebook so the most common apps are of course being hit the hardest. There’s simply more odds there will be someone else’s posting in the stream at the same time as yours and content collapse will happen.
While apps gained ground with the “repair” to the calculation most of these apps are being used to feed business-important fan pages.
Pages already struggle for visibility in the news feed and operate at a lower display rate than Subscription/Profile postings. Adding insult to injury isn’t going to help the page.
But… but… but… I hear you sputter!
I know, the loss of apps for scheduling posts is just really hard to take.
So what’s the solution?
The solution is to use them in strict moderation and any time you can still post naturally.
Let me explain…
Use scheduled content to round out your shared content for the day. Perhaps use it in a time block you can not normally be present, to give value, where any engagement would be better than the zero you would have gotten.
For example, a few days a week, I use a scheduled Hootsuite post, to my page, in hours that the site is active but I am sleeping, to deliver a helpful tip or trick my community can use.
No harm done if it’s not seen… but some that DO see it will click like (which fuels it’s visibility higher) because it’s good stuff.
I ALSO have my blog posts auto-publishing, HOWERVER, I almost always remove the un-loved (no shares, no likes) auto-post as soon as I see it and replace it with an original share. The difference is big and worth it.
Why do I leave the auto-share in place? Because there are occasionally a few days a month that I do not get back to the computer in time to replace it and it becomes the only eyeballs that post got.
Better something than nothing as long as it’s not (a) spammy (b) your only post of the day (c) more than the third post of the day and that it also (d) gives value.
It’s really that simple!
You can have your cake and eat it too!
(Though, as with cake, it has to be in moderation!)
Do you use applications to post to your Facebook page or profile? Do you do scheduled posts to your page? Which applications would you be lost without? What’s your favorite business AND non-business application that makes posts on Facebook?
This article originally appeared on Just Ask Kim and has been republished with permission.
Find out how to syndicate your content with Business 2 Community.
Hi Kim, you are correct. Facebook is deprioritizing posts coming from third-party apps, but I like your strategy. We will work with Facebook to try to see if there are ways to work around this issue. Thanks!
Ricky
CEO, Crowdbooster