Something that is constantly a struggle for anyone using Facebook to grow their business is the Facebook algorithm.
Facebook has an algorithm that decides what posts show up in news feeds, and what posts are hidden.
Your job, to grow your business, is to get Facebook to show your posts to as many people as possible.
We ran some experiments over the past couple of weeks to see what types of posts Facebook likes and shows to more people, and what types of posts they hide from people’s news feeds.
What we found, is that when a link to something outside of Facebook was included in a Facebook post, Facebook highly penalized that link.
On a normal post to our Paparazzi Facebook group with about 9,000 people in it, there are usually about 550 people who see the post (about 6%).
What I tested, was I made a few posts that included a link to something outside of Facebook.
In my case, I included a link here to Bling Academy.
What we saw, is that those posts with the link in it only reached about 40 people, or about .4%.
6% is not a great reach rate, but it is a lot better than .4%.
What we concluded was that it is pretty much useless to post to Facebook with a link to something outside of Facebook.
An exception to the rule
Now, this doesn’t apply to links to other Facebook things.
If you include a link in your post to another one of your Facebook posts, Facebook does not penalize those posts (in fact they might even boost it).
This makes perfect sense if you think about it, Facebook wants people to be on Facebook. If you include a link to a youtube video, that is going to encourage people to leave Facebook, which is the opposite of what Facebook wants its users to use.
So I think it is safe to say that this trend will continue, and Facebook will keep doing things this way.
So how can I post links?
What’s the solution? If you can’t post links in your post, how can you get people to visit your Paparazzi website? How can you get people to see articles?
The solution, is to put the link in the comments, not in the post itself.
Write your posts, and put at the bottom “The link is in the comments below!”, then make the first comment be your link to the article or website that you want to link to.
This gets the link to people, but makes sure that your post doesn’t get penalized by Facebook.
I hope that is helpful in increasing your Facebook reach!
