Insight into Facebook as a small business social media tool

Here is an insight I picked up this weekend about Facebook’s small business media distribution policy:

One of my Facebook friends Laura Jane Hawley recently posted two announcements a few days apart about her business’ participation in a local home show. Both post included interesting photos and a brief one line mention about the show. One post was made just before the show and the other during the show. I might have attended as a local homeowner if I had known of the show (the presumed reason for the social media post!). But both posts were ignored by Facebook and did not make it to my news feed. I noticed them while doing some digging afterward. In contrast, a post she made in between the two dates about the Contractor of The Year award did make it to my news feed – along with dozens of other people’s pet videos over the weekend. This message that made it through Facebook filters might have included a phrase “…while I’m at the home show this weekend…” but it did not.

The point of this, I think, is that we all have a lot more to learn and consider about Facebook as a small business social media tool. We could continue to draw out some inferences about what works, what doesn’t work but that would really be speculation. The important point is that we need to give more consideration to the issue.

Looking at these posts in retrospect, I suspect that they might have received wider distribution if not linked to the URL to the home show web site. Trade shows like this are an obvious potential source of advertising revenue for Facebook and I can understand their policy deliberately depreciated posts linking to it. If you think about it, there were likely hundreds or thousands of posts promoting the same URL on the same days so Facebook did not need any of its genius to design the logarithm for that filter.

Beyond that specific observation, I think that we just need to pay attention to the distribution statistics about what’s working / what’s not working with our small business social media posts.

The lesson to be learned here is that we should experiment, mix it up, pay attention to distribution stats in real time, and don’t be afraid to try something different, unconventional, and contrary to what seems to be the “normal” way of handling social media posts.