Step Four - Do You Need A Facebook Page?

Have you ever noticed how often the same person Likes your posts? In all likelihood, it's because she is one of the few who actually saw it! These days, most people know about Google's famous search engine algorithm: the ever-changing mystery program that decides how to rank your website when someone searches for your service. Even today the game still is: how can I get my website to rank at the top? So we hire SEO specialists to help us.. But how does this all work on Facebook? Facebook has also developed a unique algorithm. In Facebook your first challenge is to get people to see your post. Ranking, in the Facebook sense, means getting your post seen in someone's personal newsfeed. Originally, Mark Zukerberg and his team were focused on giving you a newsfeed that reflected your interests - if you got bored, you wouldn't come back. So Mark programmed the algorithm to learn every time you Liked a post - it would send you more posts like that (from that person or on that subject). Of course, it is way more sophisticated than that - but for now understand that you influence how the algorithm responds to you, and Mark wants that to continue. However, you don't pay any money to Facebook so how can Mark can continue to offer this service to you… Who Is Going To Pay For This? Mark rewrote the algorithm. I am sure you have noticed it: advertisers can now buy space in your personal newsfeed. Making that move presented Mark with a fundamental problem: how much of your personal newsfeed will it sell off to strangers before it pisses you off and you stop coming back? Every media has the same problem - adds on commercial TV, display adds in the newspaper, Google adds in the search results. Most of us don't like the adds, but we accept it. In London, the Evening Standard newspaper was on it's last legs, when a clever person decided: Let's stop charging and give it away at the tube station. When people had to buy it they thought: I can read everything that in the newspaper on my smart phone, why spend the money? I'll just check email on the way home. But once it was free, they thought: why not? Circulation soared and advertisers resumed buying adds. The Evening Standard survived as a ritualistic read on the tube ride home while advertisers funded the free ride. It's the way of the world. Facebook has finally succumbed to this reality. We've had a free ride for a long time, but the free ride is over. Facebook went public, shareholders are clamouring - Facebook needs to generate the kind of disgusting profits we've come to see from the likes of Microsoft, Goggle and Apple. Apple has surpassed 150 billion dollars in spare cash. However I like Mark - he seems to be a modest, idealistic kind of guy, and my guess is that the massive profits Facebook is poised to make will one day find their way to benefitting many people. Look at Bill Gates and Warren Buffet - there is hope. How To Be Seen In Facebook's Newsfeed - You Don't Need A Page! [NOTE: This second half of my blog is a paid area describing practical ways to implement what has been described above in a Facebook group with 47 other teachers and students. You can join anytime to be part of their discussions.] At any moment, there are upwards of 5,000 different posts that could be displayed in your personal newsfeed. Mark's algorithm has to decide who gets to the top. When you consider that you usually only see 1 to 8 posts at any one time you look at your newsfeed, the competition to be ranking at the top of that is as fierce as anything Google has on offer.

Obviously, Mark doesn't want to kick out your family and friends, so who is left? People who are trying to promote a cause, hobby or business. That is: anyone who has made a Page on Facebook. Did you make a Page about your Alexander Technique practise? Some of you did, but here's what the Facebook Algorithm is asking: 1.Is that Page active? (are there several new posts every day?) 2.Are people liking the posts? (Are your posts getting 50~100+ likes?) 3.Are people commenting on your posts? (Are you getting 20+ comment threads?) 4.Are there a lot of people connected? (Are you at least over 1,000 Likes?) If you get a no to those questions, your Page is next to useless for promoting your Alexander Technique practise. Unless you are prepared to spend money, give it up. Why? Because Mark now says you must pay before your posts can be seen by people who Liked your page. Before some of them crept into the newsfeed, now almost none do. Facebook considers you an advertiser, a business, so if you want to take up precious space in a person's newsfeed, well - you need to pay Facebook for that privilege. Mark ain't giving it away for free any more. A Message For Multi-Niche Teachers Many of you in ATSuccess are still multi-niche teachers - you have created your avatar profiles, you are planning your niche, but you are not yet teaching consistently into a specific niche. There is no community that binds your students together - other than you and Alexander's Discovery. Your Alexander Technique business is built around you. Well, if you are building your practise around your personality, then invite all your students to become friends on Facebook. In a sense, you are depersonalizing your Profile page, but there are tools to filter your newsfeed if you want to see posts only from family and friends. That's not the point today - you can research that stuff on your own. My point today is that when you post as you - and not as your business - you increase the chances that Facebook's algorithm will serve this up to your friends/students. Facebook is not clever enough to read the content of what you post, all it knows is that this is a person posting, not a business, and it treats you preferentially. Mark's algorithm is more friendly to real people. You are allowed 5,000 friends. After that, even Facebook thinks you must be a business. Honestly - who has 5,000 friends? 5,000 is generous, more than most of you will ever need. I don't know any Alexander Technique teacher in the world who is even close to having that many friends. Basil Kritzer - my first model student and nicher extordinairre - now has 2,569 friends. Does he know them all? Of course not. They are mostly Basil's followers, not friends. Take a look at his page - https://www.facebook.com/basil.kritzer - and you will see that it does all the things a Page can be doing: showing blog posts, links to articles, announcements about workshops, invitations to mail lists and as well as all the corny stuff: pictures with adoring students, amateur videos from the classroom, happy dinners, photos from his wife's new fashion co-ordination business. It's all happening in his personal profile page. Make that the centre of your activity. Please share what is happening in your Facebook world... https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATCSProMembers/ NEXT: How To Make A Facebook Work For Free