Yesterday I was looking at the stats for the
Tenacious Toys Facebook page and I was very dismayed to see that despite having 17,000+ Likes, my five most recent posts to that page only garnered 5 views. Total. Out of 17,000 people, FB told me that only five people saw those posts.
That's... errr.. not good.
I'm not saying FB is the sole source of income for me, but people are on FB a lot and getting my products in front of them is pretty important, at least to raise awareness and generate interest. From interest comes sales, usually.
Before FB rolled out their pay-for-exposure model, I could post a few images to Facebook and generate a few sales, almost 100% of the time. This became an integral step in listing new items on my website: send em to FB and Twitter, instant sales. Now, with about 1 or 2 organic sets of eyes on my (unboosted) posts, my sales referred from FB have dropped to nearly zero.
Like I said, I was dismayed so I posted about it on my personal FB page. One of my friends Chris Unclebach who runs a video game shop in TX (
Insomnia) seems to know a bunch about FB and he told me that when he checked my Tenacious FB page, the "Get Notifications" option was not checked.
The whaaaaa?! Honestly, I hadn't even heard of "Get Notifications" on FB business pages.
Apparently the new feature allows you to Like a FB page but turn OFF the notifications if that page posts too much for your tastes. That's cool- some people (like myself) post to their business pages a lot. That's not cool for everyone so I like the feature.
HOWEVER, there is a minor detail here that needs to be made public: from what I gather, when they rolled out "Get Notifications" they made the default setting "OFF" instead of "ON." On is indicated by a checkmark next to the words Get Notifications. Off is indicated by the absence of a checkmark.
Here's an example:
go to my Tenacious FB page. Hopefully you already "Like" it. If you do, you will see a button that says "Liked" which shows you you're already liking my page:
Hover your cursor over the word "Liked" and watch the dropdown appear. If Get Notifications has a check next to it, you will see notifications in your News Feed from that page. If there is NO checkmark, you will NOT be shown the posts by that page.
I checked multiple other pages: ones I manage myself, plus ones I just Like, like a normal FB user. Get Notifications was OFF for every single page I like. Now that I review my feed, I can figure out what was missing: all I see is posts from PEOPLE I'm friends with, and paid advertisements. Very few, if any, updates from the Facebook business pages I like.
Very disheartening, but at least I know what's going on with Facebook now. Regretfully I don't think I can post to my Tenacious FB page and ask people to turn Get Notifications on for my page, cuz their notifications are off and they won't see my %#@($*^$*&*^@$#ing post... hence this blog post instead.
So, PLEASE,
go to my Tenacious Toys FB page, and turn Get Notifications on! I have created a new cover photo template that incorporates a call-to-action encouraging visitors to turn Get Notifications on. I guess that's my crappy, ham-fisted solution to the problem.
Oh, and please share this post. There's a bajillion Share options all over this damn blog. Share it to your FB page. Whatever. Get the word out. You'll probably have to go find all the FB pages you like AGAIN and turn on Get Notifications for them as well, and if you run your own Facebook business, art, or fan page you too might have to tell people about Get Notifications somehow.
Oh and if I'm an idiot, and I got some aspect of this FB bullshit wrong, feel free to light me up in the comments. Till then,
see you on Google+.
