It is still surprising to me how many folks don’t know that Facebook does not show your page posts to 100% of your fans. I can see mouths dropping all over the place. Yes, it’s true. On average, Facebook only shows your posts to about 16-20% of your fans. How does it determine who sees the post? Well, that’s a closely guarded secret, but they do some fancy-schmanchy figuring for sure. But you do have options.
Pay for it – You do have the option of paying to show your posts to all your fans. There are promoted posts, and sponsored stories, and good old fashioned ads. Each of those can be used effectively in certain situations. But what if you are poor (like most of us) and can’t afford to pay for it? Well, you have another option that is full-proof, but it requires that you show your fans how to do it. And it’s important to note that you can’t force this on your fans, they have to take action on their part. Here is how they do it…
(NOTE: the next steps can only be performed if you are using Facebook as your personal profile. Thanks MAC for noticing that!)
Interest Lists – Creating Interest Lists is a great way to group together your favorite pages and people so that you don’t miss any of their posts. And you can add those Interest Lists to your “favorites” section in the upper left corner of your Facebook home page so you can click on them and see just their stuff. And the added benefit of creating these Interest Lists is that every post from all those pages and people on your Interest Lists also show up in your news feed. So here are the steps to create one:
1. Go to one of your favorite Facebook pages (like mine for example: www.facebook.com/steveholtconsulting) and hover over the “Liked” button. You’ll see a option to “add to Interest lists”. Here is a screenshot:
2. Go to your Facebook homepage and look in the lower left corner for your “Interest Lists” section. Hover over the list you are working with and click the pencil icon on the left side, revealing a drop down list where you can click on “add to favorites”. Like this:
3. Now look in your “Favorites” section in the upper left corner of your Facebook home page and click the name of your list. When the list main screen loads, look in the upper right corner for the “manage list” button. Click that button to reveal the “notification settings” and “choose updated types” items. Set your preferences there. Here is the screenshot:
Bam! You’re done. Anybody who does that won’t miss any of your posts. And don’t forget, they won’t bother with this if you don’t already have great content and updates to begin with, so you have to have that in place before this is gonna work! And I already provided you the steps above, so share this page with your fans and they can follow the 3 easy steps above. Good luck!
