Facebook Pages are a place on Facebook for businesses, just as Facebook profiles are a place for individuals. To reduce confusion between personal pages, they are sometimes called "Facebook Business Pages", even though Facebook pages can also be used for nonprofits or other groups such as musical bands, theater groups, schools or even geographical areas.
For a business the most important aspect of a Facebook page is the ability for people to "like" the page to become fans of the business. Why is that useful? It is similar to getting someone to sign up for a business e-mail newsletter, except not being quite as strong a channel. Each business page has a "wall" on which the administrator can post things like text or images. A wall post might announce a new product that the business has launched, for example.
The newsfeed is the list of interesting items Facebook shows a user when they log in to the site. Business wall posts may appear in the news feeds of the people that liked the page, just as an e-mail newsletter might appear in a the e-mail inbox of a subscriber.
While an e-mail newsletter is quite certain to reach the inbox of a subscriber, a Facebook page wall post is much less likely to reach the newsfeed of a fan. There are many items vying for the attention of each user. If you post on your page about a new product launch, you would want everyone to see that post on their newsfeeds. However there may be other things competing for the attention of the recipient. Perhaps their friend just got married and the newsfeed post of the marriage announcement is judged to be more important.
There could be other things similarly important. If there are a lot of things of importance going on, then Facebook might decide not to mention the product launch to that user at all.
Surely someone at Facebook is not personally reading and judging every possible item that could appear in a newsfeed, so how do they decide which ones to show? Facebook has a system that judges items based on the what kind of an item it is and the relationship between the publisher of that item and the recipient. When a friend that the person often interacts with posts a relationship change, that would be a strong item on both counts. A business that a user liked a long time ago and has never interacted with since would have a lower affinity with the user than their best friend does.
How can you influence this system so that your posts would be considered more important? You might never be able to beat the affinity of the best friend of a user, but you can try to beat other businesses. If you could make posts that many people click "like" on, then those posts could be seen to be of higher quality than posts from other businesses that not many people liked. Your goal then is to post things that have a high likelihood of being "liked".
One way to accomplish this is to give the recipients an incentive to like the post. The reward does not have to be physical. Simply giving the recipient some recognition for liking a post can often work. One suggestion is to pick a fan as the "fan of the week" based on how much they liked your posts. When users see others getting picked as the fan of the week, they will also be encouraged to like your posts. You can hold such a competition manually, or you can use my application <a href="
http://apps.facebook.com/fanofthe/">Fan of the Week</a> to automate the task.
Exactly how Facebook judges the importance of newsfeed posts is a bit of a mystery and part of their secret sauce. There are not that many signals that Facebook could consider though when judging newsfeed posts, and the amount of likes probably plays a big role. Get users to like your posts and you might just outrank your competitors in the battle for newsfeed exposure.
Facebook Pages are a place on Facebook for businesses, just as Facebook profiles are a place for individuals. To reduce confusion between personal pages, they are sometimes called "Facebook Business Pages", even though Facebook pages can also be used for nonprofits or other groups such as musical bands, theater groups, schools or even geographical areas.
For a business the most important aspect of a Facebook page is the ability for people to "like" the page to become fans of the business. Why is that useful? It is similar to getting someone to sign up for a business e-mail newsletter, except not being quite as strong a channel. Each business page has a "wall" on which the administrator can post things like text or images. A wall post might announce a new product that the business has launched, for example.
The newsfeed is the list of interesting items Facebook shows a user when they log in to the site. Business wall posts may appear in the news feeds of the people that liked the page, just as an e-mail newsletter might appear in a the e-mail inbox of a subscriber.
While an e-mail newsletter is quite certain to reach the inbox of a subscriber, a Facebook page wall post is much less likely to reach the newsfeed of a fan. There are many items vying for the attention of each user. If you post on your page about a new product launch, you would want everyone to see that post on their newsfeeds. However there may be other things competing for the attention of the recipient. Perhaps their friend just got married and the newsfeed post of the marriage announcement is judged to be more important.
There could be other things similarly important. If there are a lot of things of importance going on, then Facebook might decide not to mention the product launch to that user at all.
Surely someone at Facebook is not personally reading and judging every possible item that could appear in a newsfeed, so how do they decide which ones to show? Facebook has a system that judges items based on the what kind of an item it is and the relationship between the publisher of that item and the recipient. When a friend that the person often interacts with posts a relationship change, that would be a strong item on both counts. A business that a user liked a long time ago and has never interacted with since would have a lower affinity with the user than their best friend does.
How can you influence this system so that your posts would be considered more important? You might never be able to beat the affinity of the best friend of a user, but you can try to beat other businesses. If you could make posts that many people click "like" on, then those posts could be seen to be of higher quality than posts from other businesses that not many people liked. Your goal then is to post things that have a high likelihood of being "liked".
One way to accomplish this is to give the recipients an incentive to like the post. The reward does not have to be physical. Simply giving the recipient some recognition for liking a post can often work. One suggestion is to pick a fan as the "fan of the week" based on how much they liked your posts. When users see others getting picked as the fan of the week, they will also be encouraged to like your posts. You can hold such a competition manually, or you can use my application Fan of the Week to automate the task.
Exactly how Facebook judges the importance of newsfeed posts is a bit of a mystery and part of their secret sauce. There are not that many signals that Facebook could consider though when judging newsfeed posts, and the amount of likes probably plays a big role. Get users to like your posts and you might just outrank your competitors in the battle for newsfeed exposure.