D.I.Y.

Facebook Reduces Fan Page Text Update Distribution, Gives Page Owners Advice

Facebook-logoFacebook has announced that they are tweaking their newsfeed a bit by changing how they handle text status updates. They've found that text status updates from friends lead to more status updates while those from pages do not. So text status updates from friends will now see more distribution than those from pages. However Facebook makes a more specific suggestion that page owners should find of use.

Facebook's latest News Feed update is based on an observation:

"Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves. In fact, in our initial test when we showed more status updates from friends it led to on average 9 million more status updates written each day. Because of this, we showed people more text status updates in their News Feed."

"Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn't true for text status updates from Pages…Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types."

Though they don't clearly say it, since Facebook describes "story types" in this post as "status, photo, link or video," I assume they mean a text-only status update not containing a link.

[Update: Based on general coverage and the below examples, I guess a "text status update" can include a link in the sentence in which case you would have chosen not to show the stuff Facebook brings back when you put in a link. If you do show that stuff it's apparently some kind of link post. But I don't really know to be honest. They need a damn glossary at this point.]

Given that page owners are getting a bit testy these days, Facebook was smart enough to include a suggestion.

Don't make your link posts like this:

Facebook-1

Make them like this:

Facebook-2

The second is said to get more engagement and therefore FB will show it to more people.

Note that to achieve the second, as far as I can tell, you have to insert the link, wait for the FB-chosen content to appear, and then delete the link.

Best of luck!

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Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is relaunching All World Dance. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

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3 Comments

  1. As a page owner, I find that even the type of posts shown above are getting substantially lower distribution. I do include a second link in my posts and I am wondering if that inclusion causes the distribution of my page post to drop.

  2. It’s a full time job just posting to social media as it is for my business. It’s stuff like this that make me want to spend my time hiring a blimp or dragging letters across the sky behind a crop duster. I might get better results.
    http://www.apparatus.ca/blog

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