My posts being seen by fewer and fewer of our "fans"

[ChanandlerBong]

I have a page for a site we run. It has about 700 likes and this increases by 2-3 per day. We decided to start posting our content, one page a day and have received no negative comments about this, only positive.

We use an automated service to post one url/snippet per day and we can also get analytics information about reach, clicks, shares, likes, etc. The pages we post daily are educational exercises, they are the raison d'etre of the site, one exercise a day and the share/like % for each post has been very decent.

We began doing this about 6 weeks ago and the reach was about 150 views, we are now getting about 40 a day, remember, this is out of 6/700 users who "should" be seeing it.

We had one theory, that people were just blocking our content from their wall feed, getting sick and tired of us.

But then we found out about "EdgeRank" (good explanation here [edgerank.net]) and there's now the distinct possibility that FB themselves are simply not showing our posts on most people's walls.

First question, which theory is likely to be correct? Or possibly a combination of the two?

Second question, is there any way for us to increase or reset our edgerank score? Perhaps we should hold off posting for week or so?

[Tropical Island]

They now want you to "promote" your posts to reach the widest audience.

We do this about once a week. We have almost 19,000 fans & with a small investment we reach between 25,000 & 40,000 per post depending on "shares" & "likes" for the post. Select "friends & friend of friends" in the options.

Have a look at your most recent post & you should see a small button on the right side that says "promote".

We find this type of promotion very effective for our B&B business. We usually promote discounts or weekend specials. It certainly pays for itself especially in high volume periods like national vacations or long weekends.

[ChanandlerBong]

TI, thanks for that. Seems natural FB will try and squeeze some dollars out of it. Out of interest, what sort of ball park figure are you talking about for one post to those 19k fans of yours? Is their fee based on how many fans you have or not?

[Tropical Island]

You can choose from $10 to $75+ for 3 days depending how much reach you want. We stay low because we are a fairly small business however it's also a good way to increase your fan base. For $15 they promise a reach of around 20,000 for our market.

[mslina2002]

Lots of people are upset about these recent changes. I noticed the drop in views as well. I suppose they need to make money some how.

Tropical Island, good to hear you are getting the results you want.

[James Donovan]

May be you have made customized settings of your facebook account or I think your settings are changed.

[ChanandlerBong]

Just thought I'd post a follow up to this.

We did a promoted post last week and were DELIGHTED with how easy, cheap and effective it was. 5.5k impressions for about five bucks, tons of clicks, shares and page likes. We'll do one every two weeks or so, don't want to overcook it.

One other thing we noticed: we've been using an app (Buffer) to post our daily stuff and, as noted in OP, been seeing "seen by" numbers bleeding away. Today, I was on the site and decided to post something manually - i.e. not using 3rd party app, and already, that post has been seen by more people than any other post in 3 weeks. And, from experience, I know that number will grow pretty fast at least for another 12 hours or so.

Any chance that FB treats posts posted on FB itself differently to those posted by external apps? I wonder...