In the past few years most businesses have created Facebook brand page. In the recent past, one popular way to use these pages was to create a landing page as a way to force new visitors through a “fan gate”, which provided an opportunity to display some branding, messaging and get them to “like” the page. That tactic worked great for a while, but as many of you know, Facebook is always changing. With he rollout of timeline Facebook discontinued our ability to send traffic directly to these “cool” landing pages. All visitiors are now sent directly to the timeline. This resulted in a 53% decline in visits to tabs. That’s right, those tabs that you spent time and resources creating are less than half as effective as they were last year!

Facebook is Constently Changing
Timeline isn’t the only thing Facebook has changed. They are always adjusting, iterating and trying to improve user experience, and of course find ways for Facebook to make more money. We’ll go over a few major changes and things to pay attention to here:

Focus on the Content
The one thing that hasn’t really changed much is the importance of keeping your page updated with good quality content. Creating regular posts that inform, entertain and engage your fans remains the number one activity that you should focus on with Facebook. After all, on the web content is still king.
What Facebook has changed is how they displays these updates.

Fighting against Edgerank
Facebook uses an algorithm called edgerank to score your updates. The more likes, comments and shares your posts get on a regular basis, the higher edgerank score you have, and the more people will see them. For example, if I am following a brand’s page and like or comment on their posts frequently, their posts will be rated higher in my news feed. The higher your edgerank, the higher reach your posts will have. Conversely, if you are getting very few likes & comments your posts will have a low edgerank score, and will be stuck way down in people’s news feeds, where thay probably won’t see it.

A way around EdgeRank?
In the past if you wanted to increase exposure to your facebook page, you would buy facebook ads. These ads are sold on a pay per click (PPC) basis and would be delivered using highly targeted demographics from facebook’s users. This system worked pretty well (and still does).

Sponsored Stories
The newest way that’s becoming a “go-to” tactic for promoting your page is using Facebook’s sponsored stories feature. Instead of being banished to the side of the page like ads, stories are in the news feed. Another key difference is that sponsored stories come from friends who have somehow engaged with a page. Maybe it’s because the messages are integrated into our friends updates, but whatever the reason, data shows that sponsored stories work!

Try these tactics on your Facebook page and let us know how they worked, but don’t wait too long, who knows how long it will be before Facebook changes things once again!