Facebook Fan Fanpages

i never cared for it. my posts used to post there automatically. but not any more. i have to do it manually and its a pain to do. its useful if you want to use it to advertise, paying facebook. but that proved out to be pointless for me.

don't erase it, it does no harm. i think you need a bunch of follows before you can install the FAA cart there. there is little reason to remove stuff because google finds it. you can log into groups as your page, and get people funneled in that way, if that's worth it to you.


----Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I've had my page since 2010. I post my Premium site links manually every day. I have almost 3,000 followers so I'm keeping it.I also have my FAA shop on my page. As Mike said, it does no harm to keep it. One never knows where a sale comes from.

I agree with Jessica. And wasn't there some weird FB rule a while back about posting too many things for sale on our private pages? Wasn't it considered spam? We could get away with it as long as we posted to our business / fan pages first? Of course, that was probably years ago ... a lot of water has gone under the FB bridge since then, but I thought that was the reason FB pretty much coerced us into creating those pages to begin with (I honestly think they thought they could squeeze a lot of ad revenue out of us).

I have one of those pages, and occasionally someone flies by there who isn't a "friend" on my personal page ... they see something they like ... maybe they make a purchase?

Plus, I'm pretty careful about who I include as a "friend" on my personal page ... well I try to be, anyway ... and this way, if someone I don't really know wants to keep up with me and interact, they can do so via the business / fan page.

I opened a new page last week. Just for my stories and art and some contests

I do not have many people there but they are there because they want to be (I hope) and that is all you can ask from a page

I finally surpassed 50 followers on my fanpage, so too early to tell. It would make more sense if we could have our FAA shop on the page, but I think that was discontinued or the follower minimum was changed to some crazy follower count.

I like my FB fanpage, mine called Cats of Karavella Atelier to my cat paintings, and other themed paintings. Most of my sales come from there, and even if is more about cats, I started i sell occasionally non-cat art too from my catpage, which is cool.
I tag myself in every page post, so in the activity log I can allow them on my profile timeline, this way my posts are visible on my profile too, which is more for family, but as I comment in groups as my personal profile, I started to have followers on my profile too, not only at the page

we are building up a community at my page, I mean me and my cat :DDD

https://facebook.com/catsofkaravella

I was wondering how many followers do you have to have to install the FAA app? I will keep it. How did you guys with so many followers build it up. I've thought about running Facebook ads?

2000 but it is not working anyway right now and I have a feeling Facebook will stop even that soon

Facebook fan pages and business pages receive almost no natural engagement.. something like .01%. It's best to think of them as a digital "business card". The only native Facebook way to grow them is to pay for advertising. But for free, and if it makes sense for your time, you can drive traffic to your fan page from other social or marketing sources, but I wouldn't recommend spending time or money on that.

A better Facebook strategy is to create a group around your subject matter, post good written content regularly in the group so that you can be considered a "thought leader" in the field your group focuses on. Then invite others, post and join other groups and contribute to those... the more active you are the more people will join your group and fan page.

There are also many, many ways to drive traffic to your Fan Page that may be considered somewhat black hat or grey hat, but are quite effective and less expensive than paying Facebook.

But in general these days we find Facebook really is a pay to play platform, so if your plans don't include paying for advertising it's best to focus your time on platforms with more natural engagement like Pinterest and Instagram.

With FB's new commitment to Groups, I am not sure I would spend a lot of time building a Fan page vs building a presence and participation in Groups.

Of couse, if you already have a Fan Page, I certainly would not abandon it or stop using it just as I had in the past. No one really knows exactly FB is going with groups vs Fan Pages.

I am not sure everyone going out and building their own individual group is going to be the way to go.

I have 11 FB groups and it takes forever to build up a group even when open to very broad subject let along one, unknown artist's work.

With over 620 million groups already out there, there are plenty of individual groups that already have tens of thousands of members and some even well over 100,000 members.

Starting from scratch is kind of like reinventing the wheel, IMHO.

Generally we recommend building a group around your subject matter or specific niche, not yourself. So for instance if you are photographer that specializes in seascapes shot medium format black and white film, you would build a group around that. Basically you are looking to become a thought leader in your niche. Then participating in other groups can drive traffic to your group and your other outlets. Essentially you need a way to monetize your time spent in Facebook groups.

If there are already 500 groups featuring antique cars as an example, some of them with 5,000, 10,000 maybe even 50,000 or 100,000 members. I simply do not see the sense in reinventing the wheel. You can join ten groups and reach over 100,000 people or you can start your own and spend your time trying to build a group and after a few years be lucky to have a few thousand members.

It is kind of like having to build your TV station because you want to advertise on TV or you can just advertise on the one that already has the audience.

If you can fill a niche or a void where no genre or topic or theme exists, that would maybe be the way to go.

The other thing we are already seeing is existing groups not allowing people to solicit members from their groups to startup groups.

To me, this entire idea of groups proliferating at a rapid rate is going to saturate the market and make it less viable than more to even post on Facebook. It is all about FB selling ads and boots to more competitive groups cutting up the same market.

It is like having six newspapers or radio stations in a market that way to small to support the market place.

I think in the long run FB is going to be the only winner here. The individual seller trying to sell into the same market with more and more groups is going to have to work a lot harder or spend a lot more money.

I do agree that unless a person has sufficient budget and understanding of basic advertising to develop a decent advertising plan, they should not be paying for ads or boots

Jordan, you can build up your page with followers without ads, by sharing your content from your page to appropriate groups as your profile or as your page. On the post in the group, it will appear the "like Page" button and also "send message" button if you enabled it on your original post at your page, so if they like your content in the group, they will visit your page for more, and like or and follow your page.

Just dont abuse, and see if you can before you do it, if not, they will kick you out without notice

Abbie my Faa Shopping Cart is still working on my FB page, at least I can click on it, and see the stuff, I dont know if it is good to conclude a purchase.

Since it is there, I dont dare to touch it , or it may disappear :DD

You are lucky but if you touch it then it will not come back

The reason to build your own group around a niche is that you have control of the group and can drive traffic from there to whatever you want to sell or grow. Most other groups you join won't really give you that control. Just posting in a bunch of groups around your niche will help, but won't give you results you need if you want to use it for marketing purposes. If you want to just be enjoy being part of a community, well in that case it's fine.

Chris that is the reason I built up my page, because I can do there what I want as I am in control ..
I am not hanging around in bunch of groups for the sake of being the part of their community, but I do it on my page, so I fuel members from groups to my page to hang around me lol

There are rumours that FB will favour groups, but I wont neglect my working page of 5k+, and start a group from zero because of that. Neither will open a co-group to my page, because it would kill the movement on my page to zero I believe. Right now I think if FB would close pages, I would open group with the same name as my page now, and ask my personal profile followers to join and start over. till then I am fine with my page.

I think if you just start now on FB, it is kind of whatever if you start to build up a page or a group, in both case you will have huuuge competition whatever is your niche, also depend what you want. You want to let them post and have fun, and take care all that things they post, or you want to post your own stuff and show to others.

Dora, that is all true, and it's great to have a fan/business page already with 5K... it's hard to build up that kind of following these days. Congratulations!

The difference with fan/business page and groups is that Facebook purposefully does not give the pages natural engagement... they strangle it because they want business to pay for their advertising to promote pages. But for groups they are giving much more natural reach because those build community on their platform.

So if you start a page now and post to it Facebook will show your post to .01% or less of the Facebook users you have some connection to, and people that already follow you and your other pages. Whereas for a group Facebook will give you somewhere around 1% or more natural reach... It's logical, groups are a more natural community, which they want (need) to promote. Whereas pages are commercial promotional outlets for brands and people, which Facebook wants to charge for.

You can get your facebook page or group banned if you do too much tricky marketing (bots, posting false advertising, posting the same thing over and over again in groups, etc.) but it's pretty rare.

I know Chris, that is my problem, because I refuse to pay for ads and boosts to be more visible.

But even so, from around 5.7k people I have around 5-700 reach on those posts which I dont share anywhere else, only post to my page. Thas is more than .01%

my fear is that they decide one day to show 0% and give any visibility only if you pay. that would ruin everything I put into my page since 2016

If a person really wanted to try to predict what FB is going to do and what direction they are going to take pages and groups they should be tuned into the next earnings report or maybe, more importantly, the one after that.

The entire goal of FB has been to monetize FB to a much higher degree. They made a decision that that can be done by refocusing on groups. If they see the results are being hindered because of the reluctance of people to give up their pages and those pages are not generating revenues via being boosted or paying for ads, then those pages could go away.

I am not saying people with pages should be spending money to advertise or boost. I am saying, IMHO, there is a chance that FB may see it as a way of encouraging more groups and generating more money in the long run.

It will not matter how much money Pages are generating for the people that own them. If they are not generating money to FB is all they are going to be looking at.

Facebook has a fiduciary responsibility to make money for their stock owners, not their users, especially those users that are using the platform for free and making money doing it. They want and deserve a piece of that money, in their opinion. I am sure their stockholders agree 100%.

So but if pages are for business and groups are for communities for chit chat or socialising on a natural way without spamming and selling, and they lets say FB finish with pages because they are not willing to boost and pay, wont they want to try to do with groups the same in the future? Trying after to push group admins to pay too, or they would be hided on the same way? Because in fact you want to do the same in a group what you could or should on a page which is to sell your art. In hope of better visibility, because groups are not that hided theoretically.

So can be the next step to squeeze money then from groups too, if page owners migrate to create new groups in the hope of sell their whatever things.

I think there are plenty of Business pages who pay lots of money for their visibility to FB, and lots of small fishes like poor artists. :))) If not, why every time I open facebook I am bombarded with lots of cat stuff to buy? You know from those who sell the china cat stuff with stolen designs, they have trillions of page followers, and their posts liked by thousands. Those guys must be paying big. and every art related sponsored posts I come across from printing companies, art supplies based on my interests. They are all pages, not groups.

Anyway, I am always terrified that one day can be a glitch or something and my page fly away, and since Floyd you always say this about possible future of pages, I am terrified even more lol

( also today I got a message from a fake account who wanted to impersonate one of my buyers from about a year ago.. these kind of things freaks me out to lol .. So sometimes I think I just try to ride the wave till I can then I will see whats next)