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The only constant about Facebook is their joy of changing things. Many businesses have embraced Facebook Pages as a way to build a community around their business, but the latest round of Facebook changes seem to be having an impact on many business pages with many businesses pages commenting that engagement on their pages had dropped away recently.

Facebook’s latest change surrounded your newsfeed – where it presents to you stories that it thinks are the most important to you. You can change to see all the stories … well sort of.

Over the past few weeks I have been watching what is appearing in my newsfeed and it appears that Facebook only feeds some of the business pages people have liked into the feed – not all. The majority of posts on business pages are not appearing in the newsfeed. This has a significant potential impact on a number of my clients.

So I ran two different experiments to test the issue:

1. The “Like rampage”: I tested to see if I actively liked or commented on a page, whether or not subsequent posts would appear in my newsfeed – testing the idea that perhaps they were only showing information where I had actively engaged with the page.

“Liking” a post on a page had zero result on later page posts appearing in my newsfeed. If I made comments on a page, there was an increased chance that all the subsequent posts would appear in my feed (but no certainty).

2. The “What am I missing” test: In this test I created a List in Facebook of all the pages I had “liked”.  I checked the new List results to see what I had been missing. At least 90% of all updates were not appearing in my regular newsfeed.

All I can hypothesise is that Facebook is actively giving preference in the newsfeed to people and not business pages – which means that there is a high potential that a large proportion of the people who may have “liked” your page are not seeing any of your updates in their newsfeed.

If people can’t see your updates, they can’t engage with your business.

My personal campaign against being told what I am allowed to see …

I am not a big fan of arbitrary censorship, so I have now created a “Mega Newsfeed” List – with all of my friends and all of my pages – it is not elegant, but at least I see everything and can make choices about the information I choose to engage with.

If you want to see everything as well, here’s a quick primer in creating your own Mega Newsfeed.

1. Start by clicking on the word “List” in the left hand column of your Facebook default page
2. Click on + Create a List in the top right hand corner
3. Name it and then click “Create”
4. Click on Manage List and then choose Add/Remove Friends
5. Manually click on all your friends (a blue box and tick will show) – Click Done to Save it
6. Click on Manage List and then choose Add/Remove Friends (again)
7. This time click on the box top left that says “Friends” and then change the drop down box to Pages.
8. Manually click on all the Pages (a blue box and tick will show) – Click Done to Save it
9. Once you have your list created, hover just to the left of it and click on the pencil. Mark your list as a favourite. It will then move to the top section of your FB page.
10. Once again hover to the left of it and click on the pencil to rearrange the order. You can move it right to below the Newsfeed. When I go to Facebook, I now ignore my general Newsfeed and just go to my list. I also go through my list once a week and add in new friends and pages (did I mention the workaround is not elegant!)

I would love to hear what happens when you create your own List – how much have you been missing?

Ingrid Cliff

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Heart Harmony – SEO Copywriter