Facebook made a slight change to its site this week, a change so slight that you probably didn’t even notice. You might not even consider the change to be a big deal. To millions of bloggers (such as myself), it’s a pretty big deal.
On Wednesday, August 1st, Facebook disabled automatic cross-posting to personal profiles. Technical mumbo-jumbo aside, that means Facebook no longer allows people like me to automatically publish links to the blog posts I post on RobOHara.com to Facebook.
Allow me to offer a tiny peek behind the curtain. Here, on RobOHara.com, the blog posts I publish in WordPress are often written over multiple days. Once they’re finished, I schedule a time for the post to “go live.” The time a post gets published has a lot to do with who sees it, when they see it, and if quite frankly, if anyone sees it. Most of my posts (with some exceptions) are scheduled to go live at either 6 a.m. or 6 p.m., in hopes that people see them either first thing in the morning, or first thing after dinner.
WordPress also has the ability to post notifications to other websites. Each time a post goes live on RobOHara.com, WordPress also posts notifications on Facebook, Twitter, and, even though I don’t use it, Google+. If you subscribe to website’s mailing list, you might also get a email with a link to the new post.
These automated notifications are what Facebook has now blocked, at least for personal accounts (more on that in a moment). As of August 1st, each time I post a new blog post on RobOHara.com, nothing will appear on Facebook. I can still post links manually — and that’s probably what I’ll be doing for the time being — but it’s not a wonderful solution. I’m often nowhere near my computer when my posts go live, and there’s certainly a higher chance for human error (or for me to simply forget) by having to do it manually.
Facebook’s official stance is that anyone wishing to automatically post notifications to Facebook needs to upgrade their personal profile to an official Page. Pages on Facebook are intended for businesses, corporations, clubs, fan clubs, and so on. It wouldn’t make any sense at all for me to change my personal Facebook account to an official page.
Facebook’s alternate suggestion is for users to create a separate Page and connect that with their website. In other words, in addition to my “Rob O’Hara” personal profile on Facebook, I would also have a “RobOHara.com Fan Page” page as well. This solution might work for some bloggers, but it wouldn’t work for me. I’ve set up separate Facebook Pages for different projects and had roughly 3-5% of my followers like the new page.
So what’s behind Facebook’s big push toward Pages? Money, mostly. Page owners are constantly offered “opportunities” to boost their posts in exchange for money. Facebook Pages are geared toward businesses and designed with advertising and promotion in mind. Here’s a screenshot from a Page I run on Facebook, Vintage Videogame Ads. Note the button to “Boost Post,” the balloon pop-up explaining to me what “Boost Post” means, the button to “Promote Website,” the suggestion to “Continually Reach More People,” and the link to “Get More Page Likes.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about blogging over the past 20+ years, it’s that readers are lazy. I don’t mean that as an insult; what I mean is, the days of people visiting dozens of websites every day in search of fresh content are long gone. For years, bloggers relied on mailing lists and RSS feeds to connect with their readers. When Google Reader (Google’s free RSS reader) shut down, many bloggers shifted their approach and began posting blog updates to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. So when I say readers are lazy, what I really mean is, you have to get your content in front of people’s eyeballs somehow if you want any shot at them reading it. For 1.47 billion people, that means posting updates to Facebook. Not only does that notify my 700(ish) friends that I’ve posted a new blog post, but it allows them to share it with their friends, and also gives people a place to respond to them. Yes, occasionally respond directly on my blog and on Twitter, but by and large, I get the most interaction through my posts on Facebook.
The reality is, second only to Google, Facebook referred more people to my blog than any other website. For people like me who simply blog because we like to write, manually posting links to Facebook is just about our only option.
If you see an influx of people inviting you to their new pages, go easy on them. They, like me, are just trying to play by Facebook’s new rules and get their updates to you. Likewise, if you see an influx of new advertised/boosted Pages… now you know why.
(If you want to make sure you get an update every time I post a new blog entry, subscribe to my mailing list. It’s free, and you can unsubscribe yourself at any time.)
I get your e-mail notifications, but truth be told, my e-mail in box is more than 95-98% junk, so I go through once a week and just delete everything, rather than go in and read. Typically, I would follow the link in FB, but if they’re being Dix about pro-active linking, then I’ll just have to visit your page more often.
I check in in to Robohara.com daily for new posts, everyone else in the Western world should do the same.
It’s definitely about the money for them. I went ahead and played along and created a page and set my posts to go to the page, since it’s better than remembering to get up at six in the morning, then actually getting up at six in the morning and posting links manually. So I thought I’d share what I’ve observed after four weeks.
Oddly, my Facebook traffic is up. It was never super high to begin with, so it didn’t really have anywhere to go but up, but my number of Facebook shares went from essentially zero to double digits, and that resulted in more traffic.
I’ve also had increased traffic to some items of local interest. I can’t attribute that to Facebook but I can’t attribute it to anything else specific either. Posting that kind of stuff to a page visible to the public does seem like a good way to drum up traffic. When someone punches in the name of a defunct St. Louis institution, they’ll at least get my blog post about it.
I still have mixed feelings about the change and if I had my druthers, I’d post both to my personal feed and to the page. But the change did at least make me think about ways to promote my blog that I hadn’t thought of before.