Facebook is undeniably the king of social media, yet the site is a mystery to many of us who use it for more than keeping up with which friends just got engaged and the most recent cat meme. It’s clear we need to better understand the social media giant if we want to be successful in growing our audience.

Let’s dig in.

The Facts

1. 1.2 billion people are on Facebook. (Yes, that’s Billion.)
2. Nearly one-third of American adults get their news from Facebook.
3. Facebook accounted for one out every six minutes Americans spent online in December 2013.

The Newsfeed

In December of 2013, Facebook tweaked its Newsfeed algorithms again. The Newsfeed is what every user sees upon login, the stream of news, cat memes, photos, and links that your friends and pages are recommending. Only you don’t see them ALL—you only see what Facebook thinks you want to see. And last December’s tweaks made it a bit harder for certain types of posts to gain traction, specifically posts from Pages.

Yes, you can sort your Newsfeed by “Most Recent” (what I prefer) and “All Friends” to see a broader scope, yet I suspect many people never do this. So you need to learn how to get FB to recommend your posts if you want them seen by the largest numbers of people who have “liked” your page.

(It should be pointed out again that I’m dealing with PAGES here, not PERSONAL FB accounts. I know there are a lot of pros and cons for Page vs. Personal account, and I’m not here to debate them all. I’ll save that for a future post.)

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