The number of fans your Facebook page has can be misleading- just because they liked your page doesn't mean their newsfeed generates posts from your page. If no one is seeing your page's posts on their newsfeed, they won't be liking, commenting, or sharing them. If your posts are receiving significantly fewer likes or comments than the number of fans your page has, don't despair! Here's what might be going on:
1. You Bought Your Fans
It seemed like a great short term strategy, right? But experiments, especially this one from Veritasium's YouTube channel, have proven that purchased fans cause more harm than help. The majority of these bought likes are bots coming from international accounts. Combine a majority of fake fans, who will never respond to a post, with Facebook's algorithm, which only includes your page's posts in your fans newsfeed if there's a significant amount of interaction (either a like, share, or comment), and you've got a recipe for disaster.
How do you dig yourself out of the bought fans hole? It's not too easy, sadly. You'll need to find real fans and get them to like your page until they outnumber the bought fans.
2. Your Content Just Isn't That Interesting
Not everything's a winner. But enough uninteresting posts and that Facebook algorithm will come back to haunt you again. Another problem involves fans liking a page but choosing not to receive notifications for new posts in their newsfeed. To get an idea of why everything can't appear on everyone's newsfeed, take a look at the unfiltered Facebook ticker- for most people, it moves faster than anyone can keep up with. When Facebook has to decide what appears on your newsfeed, interaction with a post is its top ranking factor.
What should you do to increase interaction? Ask for feedback! Instead of just posting an interesting article, ask for your fans opinions on it. Do an live question and answer session or run a contest on your page! Anything that stops your fans from being passive will improve the amount of people viewing your posts.
3. You Update Too Frequently or Infrequently
Different social networks need different schedules- Twitter, for instance, encourages accounts to post more often because Twitter feeds move quickly, bumping you off a fan's feed unless you keep posting. Facebook, on the other hand, values interactions on a post more than anything else. If you post too often, your fans are spreading their interactions across too many posts, which keeps it from appearing on other fan's newsfeeds. You should aim for the most amount of interaction on every post, so limit your posting to 1-3 times a day.
On the other hand, posting too infrequently can hurt you as well. If fans don't interact with your posts for weeks because you haven't posted you'll also have trouble re-appearing on their newsfeeds when you start posting again.
Creating strong content for Facebook is mostly common sense- what's eye catching and encourages interaction? What would you want to see from your page? We're no longer in an environment where Facebook pages can increase fans exponentially overnight, but keeping to a steady scheduling of interesting and relevant content will prove its worth in the long term.