The last week or so there has been a panic brewing about Facebook’s changing Edge Rank algorithm, and the fact that business Pages’ statistics for post reach have been going down.
Some people are saying that since Facebook has been tanking in the stock market, they’ve been downgrading unpaid posts in order to encourage people to “pay to play” – i.e. pay for ads, promoted posts, and offers, if they want to increase their visibility. After all, if everything’s fine and your Page is getting good results, why would you pay for Facebook?
Some other people, however, are saying there must be a glitch in the system – that it isn’t something intentional. The numbers are off. The measurement tools aren’t working. Just wait a bit, everything will be sorted out like usual.
Still others are offering advice on what to do to get your numbers back up despite whatever is going on – to increase engagement by doing what I’ve always taught – share compelling (non-marketing) content, vary between text and videos/photos, ask questions, post consistently…
What I’d like to suggest is don’t even worry about the statistics. Having Insights by which we can gauge our effectiveness on Facebook is great. I like being able to see which posts perform better. It’s interesting to see what my Page’s demographics are. But in the end the numbers don’t MEAN anything to me because they don’t determine how much business I’m getting, or how much community I’m building, or what impact I’m having on someone’s day, week or life. PEOPLE do.
Whether the system is messed up or not, base your Page’s success on the real life impact it is having on people. Are people responding? If not, try something different. It is not that complicated.
If you had a store and you didn’t get as much foot traffic over a period of a few days would you go into analysis mode, write up a spread sheet on who came in when in the past, what they did, and where they came from? Or would you just do something?
If you had a little traffic and a fewer number of sales but the ones you had led to referrals or recurring sales, would you consider that a bad day?
Would you spend hours researching what was going on in everyone else’s stores, and discuss with them what could possibly be going on, complain about the state of things and how much better it was in the past, or would you just do something to change your personal store’s situation?
Get creative and take action. Don’t worry!
Karen Clark is a speaker and consultant specializing in teaching, inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to increase their online presence through smart Internet marketing techniques. Karen enjoys teachingbusiness owners learn how to attract qualified contacts, engage them through a spirit of service, and enroll them as customers and clients. Find out more about Karen at www.MyBusinessPresence.com