WHY SPRING CLEANING YOUR FACEBOOK NEWSFEED ISN'T JUST GOOD FOR THE SOUL

IS ORGANIC FACEBOOK REACH A THING OF THE PAST, OR DO WE JUST NEED TO CHANGE OUR HABITS?

For those of us that use Facebook pages for business, we're all overly concerned about the ever-changing algorithm and how many people see the posts to our pages. Should we be, or should we be doing something about it?

We obsess over reach because we know that only around 6% of all our page followers actually see our posts and we're constantly reminded that 'organic reach' is dwindling and a thing of the past.
​
But there's something we've lost sight of when it comes to our personal accounts and those of our followers. In my role, managing and consulting on other people's pages, I find that I 'like' a lot of similar pages when conducting research and building community links with other similar or local pages. It's part of the active listening I do when I start any project for a client and is standard practice for me.
​
What I often forget to do, is 'un-like' those pages when I've finished. Do you know exactly how many pages you've 'liked' in the time that you've had a Facebook account? Today alone, in a little spring-cleaning exercise, I have un-liked just under 300 pages which no longer have any relevance nor add any value to me or my clients.

Just think about that for a second. As a personal user, the more pages I 'like' the more content is added to my newsfeed. When the algorithm kicks in, it only picks up on what it thinks are the most relevant posts or those that I am most likely to respond to. So, effectively, the more pages I 'like', the less chance there is of me seeing their content. I'm basically pouring so much content, from so many sources, into the algorithm's funnel that at the end I get very diluted value from those pages.

Now, consider that we're continually asking users to like more and more pages (because thousands more are created on a daily basis) and that as a result there are millions of users doing exactly the same thing; accumulating more and more content and pouring it into a funnel, letting Facebook decide what diluted content they actually get to see.

By un-liking the pages that are no longer relevant to us, we straight away improve the chances of seeing content from the pages that actually matter to us. Pages that I thought were no longer posting, are suddenly appearing in my timeline, because they have less competition based on the now reduced number of pages I like.

But don't take my word for it, try it yourself. Un-like the pages that you're not really interested in, the pages that don't post anymore and the pages that continually share clickbait and useless articles. Let me know how you get on, won't you?

Yours Socially
​

M