On this particular episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I wanted to talk to you about a new feature on Facebook that I think is really useful for anybody who runs a business on Facebook to know about. But, it’s also one of those features that could get quite dangerous if it gets overused and it could actually damage your business, damage your brand, lose you followers, lose you contacts, lose you leads and lose you customers. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?
So, what is it? Well, first of all, it’s a feature that’s related to Facebook groups. I have long been advocating that anybody who runs a business on Facebook should have a Facebook group rather than just having a Facebook page. When they first came out, Facebook pages had a massive reach but, over the years, the reach of Facebook pages got lower and lower, and now it’s probably lower than four percent of followers who see your page will actually see a post you put out. This means using a Facebook page for marketing your business isn’t particularly useful, unless you spend money on Facebook advertising, of course.
Groups are much better because if you have a Facebook group not necessarily related to your business, but to your industry. You can invite people to join the group who are following your page or people who are customers of yours. You can also invite other people you see from contacts around Facebook. Then, when you post stuff in the group, more people will see it.
You’ve got a much better reach with the group than you would have with a page. You can even join the group as the page, so you can post as your business. It doesn’t have to be you and your personal Facebook profile, because I know a lot of people listening to this who have a business and have a Facebook page for their business don’t actually use Facebook themselves. I get that there’s a lot of people that hate Facebook, but it’s a necessary evil to promote your business.
Over the last year or so, people who were in Facebook groups didn’t necessarily go into the groups to see the content within the group. They were seeing the content from their group in their Facebook timeline. Nobody really goes into groups anymore to have a look around, they just see it in a timeline, and they’re only going to see it in their timeline if they have engaged recently within the group. If people don’t engage with the posts you put in your Facebook group, very few people are going to see it in a timeline. You’re going to get a very low reach on your post and very low engagement. Therefore, you’re not actually going to get any leads for your business. It’s a similar problem to what we had with Facebook pages.
This is where this new feature comes in. This feature was apparently launched a while ago, to select people. It’s now come out again over the last couple of weeks to pretty much everyone, but you have to be an admin in a group. We know that when you create a post in a group and you tag people, it will notify them. Well, Facebook now says that type in ‘@everyone’ and it will notify every single person in the group about your post. Every single person in the group will be notified about your post.
Now, there’s some caveats with this. First of all, only admins can do it, so be careful who you make an admin. An admin can only do this once every 24 hours in each group, so you can’t do this two or three times a day in the same group. And the most important thing:
You will get complaints from people in the group. I know this from personal experience. They will report the post to Facebook, and they will report the post to the admins of the group, which incidentally is you, so you will then have to reapprove your own post. So, it is a really powerful feature that you should use very sparingly because if you use this too much, people will leave your group.
There’s two ways you can do this. You can either tag everyone in the post in the group or you can choose to tag them in the first comment. I’ve experimented with this and I have noticed that if you put on a post and you tag everybody within the post, Facebook seriously delays when it notifies people. I did this at about 6:30-7:00 PM last night, because I wanted to notify people about an event the next day. They didn’t get notified about it until the following day at about 2:45 PM, well past the event. Useless, thank you Facebook, brilliant feature. However, if you put the post up as normal and tag people within the comment, it’s instant, people get notified straight away. I would advise, if you have an event that you are trying to plug or there’s something that is time sensitive, and you want it to go out at a particular slot, put the post down as normal and tag people in the comment, not in the post.
I also do suspect that this particular feature will get hammered by people. I suspect that there will be so much backlash to this feature that, eventually, Facebook is either going to remove it all together or they’re going to throttle its use somehow. So, if you’ve got a group for your business and you’ve not heard of this feature before, give it a go now before Facebook either removes it or reduces its effectiveness, because it is so useful for getting people to see what you want them to see. This is a feature that has not existed on Facebook since pages first came in back in around 2007/2008, so enjoy it and make hay while the sun shines.
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