“The red spots on this video show the focus of eyes of someone looking at their Newswall on Facebook. This shows the power of status updates on Facebook for individuals and Businesses. Notice too people looking at the inbox and notifications area. (Personal data blurred out obviously)”–From this post on Facebook research.
If you are not using your Fan Page properly to push updates to the Top News section of Facebook’s homepage then you are missing out on significant advertising and exposure.
Here’s the easiest way I’ve found to do this:
- The administrator of the Fan Page, or one of your ministry leaders, posts an update on the Fan Page
- That person then text messages a group of 5-10 more people in the ministry asking them to Like or Comment on the update
- Especially if those likes and comments happen in the same time frame that post has a great chance of making it to the Top News of most of your fans.
Although I do not know of many peers or students that check their updates, the research from this site reveals that those and ads are viewed by many users
“Updates from Pages get noticed: 71% of users looked at homepage advertisements and 31% looked at advertisements in the News Feed. Although, users paid more attention to Page updates than ads.”
Cool video huh? Do you ever click on ads or look at updates? I never click on ads or check updates, mostly because I’m often multi-tasking btw Twitter, commenting on blogs, and checking Facebook.
http://www.scottmonty.com/2009/03/advertising-to-gen-y-on-social-networks.html
Here is a blog post from the social media guy for Ford. He suggests that Gen Y users see ads but are not interested in them. They (we) are more interested in comments, music, videos, content.
As you always say, fan pages ought be a conversation rather than talking at people.
that’s a good distinction you make btw seeing and interacting.
last year when we really went after optimizing our fan page at chico state it was hard to give up the ability to message people via our group page, but it forced us to think more about engagement over distribution.
even that mindset makes sense intuitively to students/gen-y than the shout from the rooftops/hit everyone w the same message of the previous gen.