Not that long ago, Facebook implimented some pretty serious changes to the way pages work the biggest being that they now require pages to actually pay to ensure that their entire fanbase receive their updates etc. Whilst this is pretty understandable in the world of big business, it has a fairly serious impact on small home based businesses who simply don't have the revenue to invest in this sort of promotion.
When this all first kicked off you probably remember seeing a number of images / posts in your news feed encouraging you to interact with their pages to ensure you stay up to date with their latest happenings. I, like many small businesses, probably didn't take this as seriously as I should have at the time and if I'm totally honest I'm not entirely sure if it would have made a massive difference to the pages interatction levels anyway.
Well, since my attempted relauch (and I really do STRESS attempted, hence this post) at the end of July, it's actually become very apparent to me exactly how few of my 'fans' are actually seeing my posts. On average it works out at about 1/3 of my actual likers having my updates appear in their feeds. Then I have to consider how many of these people are actually likers or maybe competitors, friends, family etc. I'm basically not reaching my audience at all.
I actually DID pay to promote my recent upload of stock album as clearly this was an important event in my relaunch and therefore important that it reach everyone on my list. This cost me $5.00 for a guaranteed reach of 615 people which I thought wasn't too bad at all. On Friday night, I attempted to set up a giveaway whereby my likers had to 'share' the giveaway in order to qualify for the draw. I WAS going to promote this post until I saw that my fee had suddenly jumped from $5.00 to $10.00 to reach between 615-1000 people. I'm assuming all those over and above my actual 'liker' number (which is mid-600s) would be the friends of people who had actually taken the time to 'like' or 'comment' on the post.
Anyway, the point is - this is crazy. I just cannot afford to promote myself on Facebook adequately but I desperately need to improve the level of interaction on my page.
With that in mind, I have come up with a little bit of a campaign. It's testing the water really. I don't know if it will have any effect whatsoever but I'm going to attempt it anyway.
Not just with handmade but with the general small business market it has become essential to cross-promote each other on Facebook. I have observed this by simply watching the interactions between various pages whom I know their owners know each other well have built up relationships etc. There's no getting around the fact that Facebook wants our money. BUT it's when these small businesses put in their money and get very little to NO return then we really need to help each other out. With that in mind I have devised something that I'm going to name the 'Share Factor' and this is basically it:
I want everyone to post this on their page and genuinely promise that every time they see a promoted item in their news feeds to be sure to like it and then SHARE it on their personal page. It takes no time at all but ensures that that post reaches as many people as possible outside of the number of people that promotion has paid for. Sharing from your personal page ensures everyone on your friends list sees that promoted item and hopefully a butterfly effect will follow on. It's a small idea that I believe has BIG potential.
I'd like to see how this goes. Please support me and the 'Share Factor' by sharing this image and getting as many people to join in as possible.
