How to Maximise your Facebook views

I've seen a lot of talk on Facebook lately about how many of our posts (from pages rather than profiles) get seen by our Likers. It seems that Facebook want us to pay to share our links and so those kind of posts get hardly any views. Here is an example of the kind of thing I've seen:

"I see so many small business pages that say they're struggling because of the changes Facebook has made regarding who sees your posts, so I thought I'd write a post about how I think Facebook now works.
It seems to me that a written post gets potentially seen by 3 or 4 times more people than a photo or a link and if you are sharing your own pictures or posts you might as well not bother as they're seen by so few.

The more people who comment or click "like" on your post the more Facebook will allow it to appear in different newsfeeds. So the answer is, if you're reading this, click "like" or comment on anything and everything that catches your eye and help all us small businesses survive or one day you'll go looking for your favourite business page only to find they've given up because you didn't bother to like or to comment on their photos or posts. ♥ Thank you ♥"

 

Now I'm fully aware that not everything that is said on Facebook is true, but my experience was tending to agree with these complaints, so I thought I would try a little experiment.

I posted 3 posts on my page within minutes of each other. One post was word only, talking about what I was about to do. The next post was a direct link to an item in my Etsy shop. The final post was word only, but with a link as a comment to another item in my Etsy shop. Twenty-four hours later I checked the results:

Type of Post	Likes	Comments	Seen by
Word only post	5	8	178
Link post	2	2	50
Link in comment	2	3	127

 

If you consider that [today] my page has 458 Likers (feel free to pop over and increase that!) then my direct link post reached less than 11% of them. Even the word-only post reached only 37% of its potential audience. So the lesson I've learned here is to only post links as a comment if I want people to see them.

I guess now that Facebook has shareholders to feed it wants to make money however it can, but I do think it's sad that small businesses like mine suffer because of it. So get wise with your posts and let's see if we can outwit Facebook for a little while. And in the meantime Like as many pages and posts as you can, and support small and local businesses.

Thank you!

:-)