If you're posting 10-16 posts a day and you forcibly put each of these into 100% of your fans, you're going to shrink your base. If you did that to me, I'm going to hide or Unlike your page. If you emailed me those posts, I'd be hitting unsubscribe in half a day. The Facebook News Feed isn't an RSS reader, and the Like button isn't Subscribe.
I would suggest just posting once a day, and using the Promoted Posts for the occasional big news that you want to make sure everyone reads.
Facebook pages isn't a panacea for brands or publishers -- not by a long shot. That panacea is one of those Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.
So what? Annoying pages can get un-liked, and the problem will work itself out. But if someone is a "Fan" of the brand and wants to see all of their 15 posts in a day, it's frustrating they can't. The default in Facebook is always "Most Popular", and even when I change it to "Most Recent" (to see the long tail of my friends activities, since I don't trust Facebook), Facebook always sets it back.
The author is expecting that all 54k fans should see the page's posts, and that fewer impressions are feeling like extortion. That expectation is both incorrect and unreasonable. There will always be users who don't log in each day. Even if FB queued up the News Feed to show the post, the impression will never be driven because they haven't scrolled far enough down.
I do agree about the sort preference -- I wish it was sticky.
Why are you thinking from just on page's perspective? Most of the time a page is liked when a friend of the user shares a post from the page that the user finds interesting, it may be a kitten image, funny joke, a post about your favorite movie/actor, or about a good food on a restaurant etc. Number of pages he likes depends on how much he uses Facebook. If he is moderately active the number of pages he likes would certainly reach 3 digit number. Now imagine 15 posts per day from each of the pages! It is definitely annoying. Now you are saying about "Most Popular" setting, on which criteria will you define a post belongs to popular category? Recommendation engine is a hard problem. Page owners may complain that their pages are not getting any traction. So I think it is a fair option to pay a small price to Facebook to make sure that the post of the page will surely reach to its followers.
That bugs me too. I like a lot of things, but I don't want to hear or see any of them in my timeline.
I used to click "Like" on various things in Facebook, but after starting to see them in my feed I immediately un-Liked them. I'm willing to tell my friends I like Logitech keyboards, but I'm not willing to see whatever posts the Logitech PR decides to write. If I'm interested to learn about what new keyboards/mice there are in the market, I'll find it myself, thanks.
Clicking "Like" used to be a fun, whimsical thing. Now it's been turned into a marketing vehicle (I don't fault FB for doing that), so now it's more like a "Spam me please" button. It feels like more of a business exchange rather than an expression of my preferences.
This is a tricky thing. Facebook's business model, and its value proposition to advertisers to a large degree depends on oversharing, and your "Likes" are an example of this. If somebody asked me if I wanted my email subscriptions broadcast to all my friends, I would say "heck no." But if nobody agreed to share their subscriptions, then how would advertisers get word of mouth?
So they phrase it a bit differently. You don't subscribe, you "like." And your likes and dislikes are a part of your personality, which is something you want to share with your friends. The subscription is just a side effect of liking, and it allows marketers to use your name to spread their brand among your friends and acquaintances.
If they just called a spade a spade, it would be a disaster for them.
This sums up very nicely the conundrum that facebook finds itself in. I read somewhere, probably on HN, an analogy that Google is like a phonebook - a place one actively is trying to seek out information and lookup things that may be purchased, so ads follow logically from this scenario. Facebook is like a yearbook or chatroom, where people are engaging with their friends, not in a search for product information or trying to shop. I'm sure this can be tweaked and messed with over time, but inevitably any attempt to try to inject shopping or advertising into communication with friends is going to be met with resistance. And that resistance level is met earlier on a mobile platform.
That's exactly what I was thinking. If you like a fan page you should expect to get stuff from it.
I don't get mails from facebook saying someone posts stuff, I only get notifications up on the little globe icon so I don't care when Princess Bride or Pulp Fiction sends out little pictures of whatever. It's not annoying at all. (Unlike farmville requests, which I swear I block these apps weekly but they always notify me anyway)
If you have a page you're interested in following just add it to your interest lists on Facebook. This way you can turn Facebook into your own personal reader. The main Facebook feed has its downfalls and limitations but if you take a couple minutes to create your own personalized friend lists and interest lists you bypass this problem completely.
Do you have any large-scale statistical tests backing up your assertion that if you push 10 posts a day to peoples' Facebook feeds, your readership will shrink?
I don't disbelieve your assertion that you personally would find it annoying, but I know a good number of large, successful blogging brands do indeed push to social media multiple times a day, and it seems to work for them. Several of said brands have indeed published articles suggesting that publishing multiple times a day serves to boost, not diminish, your popularity.
In addition, some counter-anecdata: I don't really use Facebook, but I've certainly not found myself put off by those blogs I follow which post that often to Twitter, for example. Indeed, I think I'd find it more annoying if they reduced their posting frequency - I'm not on Twitter 24/7, and if they only linked to their posts in a single digest-style tweet, I'd probably miss it.
I would say it all depends on the reach. If a company publishes 10 posts a day, without promoting them, then I would think that only a few of the fans will get more than 2 or 3 of the posts that day (if we're to go with the 10%-20% estimate in the article).
Now if you were to promote all those 10 posts, and 99% of your fans would see them all, then most will get annoyed. And if they don't get annoyed within the first day, they will get annoyed soon enough,
Through this type of self selection (those who don't want all the posts will unlike, those who do will continue to subscribe), the blog may end up with a user base of the most engaged fans rather than a larger user base that causes higher "sponsored post" fees.
The most important metric for businesses using social media is engagement rather than raw reach, IMO.
They may be looking for postings from their actual friends that happened while they were offline. Boredom is't the only reason for scrolling. And if you're pushing actual friends down the page by spamming my feed, well, I'm going to think a little less of you.
Here's +1 to that statistic. If I see more then a few things a day I would definitly hide it. I already do. I love seeing interesting post pop up, but when your posts are takin over my feed you're gone :)
Unfortunately, I don't have concrete data. I should have been more careful to recommend that the author start testing with one post per day, and measure from there.
It does depend upon the page, though. If your posts get high engagement, it will have higher distribution. Of the author's 55k fans, only 14k fans are "talking about" the page, so they'll have less than full distribution. To be frank, their posts are not getting many likes. Thus, my recommendation to just do one great post per day. Also, I would suggest to the author to experiment with photos and not just links with photos. Facebook's push toward bigger photos in the feed is no accident -- they work.
There are definitely brands that have multiple posts per day, and it's largely because of the high engagement their posts drive. Two examples that I follow are "I Fucking Love Science" and "Humans of New York." They both have fewer fans than talking about, and both post multiple times a day. Because their content is highly shared, it gets great distribution. It also depends on your own engagement with the page too, as I understand it.
The best practice I hear about Twitter is to indeed publish multiple times a day. Because it acts more as a true feed and not a digest, repeating the same content at a different hour is considered to be good.
That's the first thing I thought when I read the post. I was against Facebook's position at the beginning, but now I'm really glad they are charging that fee.
Besides that, Facebook is not the channel for you to get that ammount of data to your users. Facebook is a SOCIAL network, not a brand catalog. If they let that abusive behavior happen freely(sorry, but 16 posts a day is abusive behavior at least to me) their own product would be defaced.
That's a good perspective. I'm enjoying this thread because both sides make solid points I can agree with. Which highlights to me the challenge inherent to the position Facebook finds itself in.
Let's not forget the intent of this article- Facebook is screwing page owners and real fans of the page over. Like used to be "Become a Fan". And a page owner used to be able "Send updates" to fans. There are lots of us who had tens of thousands of fans, who actually were fans. But "Fan" became "Like" and "Send updates" disappeared, and slowly posts that were shown to most of your fans were now showed to almost none. Through all these changes and monetization products Facebook has diluted it all to the point it's become useless.
They're hacks and cheats. There are other ways they could have done this.
If you did it to me I'd have the same reaction, but I'm not most people-- I log onto Facebook something like once a month, and use the magic of RSS feeds instead of fan pages.
For people who don't use RSS, or want a consolidated feed of "all the things my friends are doing" plus "all the articles this place has posted today to their Facebook feed", 10-16 posts a day isn't any more overwhelming than, say, an RSS Feed from Techdirt with 10-16 posts a day.
Agreed, when I get any more than 2 or 3 daily posts I tend to end up either unliking the page or unticking "show in news feed" - unless the posts are from a page whose content I always enjoy, like "I Fucking Love Science"
Shouldn't it just be a deteriorating reach % after your first/second post of the day?
That would be a better middle-ground than making $ by suddenly handicapping user's FB page reach.
I would suggest just posting once a day, and using the Promoted Posts for the occasional big news that you want to make sure everyone reads.
Facebook pages isn't a panacea for brands or publishers -- not by a long shot. That panacea is one of those Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.