As most of you already know, Facebook has gotten huge. In fact, there are roughly 1.55 BILLION active Facebook users. Now, that means a single Facebook user can have a very large group of friends and can ‘like’ virtually any business page or interest page on Facebook (and there are around 40 million small business pages out there now). Imagine the amount of information and posts going through a person’s Facebook feed if it was ALL visible on their feed. That would be a constant stream of information that no human could possibly keep up with or digest. So, Mark Zuckerberg and his crew have come up with a solution to that: There are specific algorithms that decide what and whose posts you see.
It’s cool (and kind of creepy) how much Facebook knows about you. They can tell by your interactions who your close friends are and what you’re interested in. They can even predict who you know or who you would like to know. Facebook is all about forming relationships and connecting you with the people and interests that, well, interest you. And most of the time, Facebook is really good at it. (Notice, the use of the phrase “most of the time.”) The folks over at Facebook have genius capabilities and could probably predict what businesses you would want to “See First,” but with this one, they let you be in control.
What is Facebook’s “See First” feature? “See First” is a free feature that a user can use to customize their news feed. It overrides Facebook’s algorithm so you see updates from the people or businesses you mark as “See First,” not just the posts the Facebook algorithm predicts you want to see. So, if you always want to see updates from BPM on your feed (which we know you do…;)), no matter how many people are posting during the time you log in, you will see whatever BPM has posted since the last time you were on Facebook. Now, this means a few different things, which we will explain:
As we just touched on, users can set your business page as one of their “See First” accounts. This means their eyes will see everything you put out on Facebook, no matter what time they log in. This takes the guessing game out for the user and for Facebook. The user knows that they haven’t missed a single update, and Facebook knows that every update needs to be shown to this user.
With this “See First” feature, there is also a discovery tool that suggests pages to ‘like’ based on the other pages you’ve ‘liked’ in the past. This is not only great for the user as they can discover new businesses based on their interests, wants and needs but also for businesses. If a user ‘likes’ your competitor’s page, you may show up in the discovery tool feature, which exposes your brand and page to your target market.
The bad news about this is that you can’t tell which users or how many have used the “See First” feature for your page. So you may have people that have put your brand on their “See First” list, and you would never know it (hopefully this is a future feature).
The other bad news is that advertising or boosting posts is going to become more essential. If a user has their “See First” list customized, and your business’s page didn’t make the cut, Facebook will put your page into the mix with the user’s friends and other pages they haven’t marked as “See First”…your odds of being seen by the user just went down. The best way to counteract that is to advertise/“boost” your posts. You’re competing for the user’s attention, but when you advertise on Facebook or boost your post, you can get really specific as to who you want to target, making it well worth your money.
There is a science to Facebook advertising, and we suggest you leave it to the expert. Call us: 920-632-7648
