Click this, please.
A whole lot of folks—875!—have “liked” the Molecular Ecologist page on Facebook, which ought to mean that all those people see new posts from the site right in their Facebook News Feed. But we’ve found that our Facebook posts are typically seen by a lot fewer than 875 folks—and the number seems to be declining. This may be a symptom of something happening with Facebook pages in general—fewer posts are reaching the people who’ve “liked” pages, possibly because there are just more pages to “like.” The solution offered by FB is to pay for placement in people’s news feeds, but this “promotion” can reach a lot of people who really aren’t interested, and that’s not why we have a Facebook page in the first place.
If you want to ensure that posts from The Molecular Ecologist make it into your News Feed, there is one thing you can do: Turn on the “get notifications” option on our page. This is illustrated above—it’s in a drop-down menu attached to the “Like” button itself. Selecting “get notifications” tells Facebook’s News Feed algorithm to give our posts priority in your feed.
And, if you want a less convoluted option, you can also receive Molecular Ecologist posts on Twitter, via RSS subscription, and even by e-mail, using the tools in our sidebar.
(Hat tip to the Facebook page for Small Pond Science for pointing me toward that recent article about the declining audience for FB pages. Ironic sourcing? Yes, maybe.)
