No One is Going to Your Facebook Fan Page

You’ve downloaded our Photographer’s Social Media Handbook. You read and assimilated every drop of information. You’ve read “Why You Need to Ditch your Personal Facebook Page”, and since built out a really nice Page. But guess what? No one is going to your Page.

Fret not. Let me explain.

Back in 2006, Facebook came out with the News Feed. This initially controversial feature aggregated all your friends’ updates into a single page. It was sort of like Twitter before Twitter, and it prevented you from having to click to every single friend to see what was going on. News Feed is the dominant mechanism by which we get micro information about our friends.

Similarly, when you “Like” a Facebook Page, you are subscribing to get posts in your News Feed. So although it’s nice to believe that tons of fans are dropping by your Page regularly, it simply is not a daily destination. This is an important reality to accept. It’s the same reason why we encourage photographers to participate in social media in the first place: your photographer website is not a daily destination for your customers, but your customers are likely going to Facebook daily. Go to where your customers are.

Your Facebook Insights allow you to see how much traffic is going to your Page. PhotoShelter’s Page hasover 25,000 Likes, but only about 400 people visit our page on a daily basis.

But we’ve worked hard at improving our Edgerank, which helps our content to show up in News Feeds.

While only about 400 people visit our page daily, we’re getting about 12,000 organic views and about the same number of viral views through the News Feed and shares. In the News Feed, our content look like this:

So if you’re constrained for time, don’t worry so much about building out your Page with “Like gates” and fancy apps. It’s more important to create compelling Wall posts that encourage people to Like and comment to increase your Edgerank, which will in turn, increase your visibility to your customers.

Want more on how to successfully channel your social media efforts? Download the free Photographer’s Social Media Handbook and get the best tips and tactics for your workflow today.