Do you want your posts to disappear on Facebook? Do you want your updates to be invisible? Then all you have to do is…
Write about about the hot news story or something seasonal.
Did you know that not all stories are visible on your News Feed? Facebook will theme certain posts together and if a lot of your friends have mentioned the same word or news item, the posts will be collapsed. See the picture below.
This is bad news for all Facebook Page owners who will be mentioning the word “Christmas” frequently in the next few weeks!
Facebook have changed their policy about which posts they collapse.
Posts via Twitter, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck no longer get collapsed which means that these posts are now more visible. Which is a pity as far as I am concerned about Twitter. I personally hate my Facebook News Feed being filled with Tweets! But good news about Hootsuite because it is useful for prescheduling posts.
Still getting collapsed
Networked Blogs posts are still getting collapsed which is bad news for bloggers using this third party application to automatically post their new blogs to Facebook.
And that goes for posts from Foursquare and Tumblr too. Have a look in your News Feed to see if you can spot more.
Even the title of this post means that it gets collapsed on Facebook.
So my Top Tip for you in December is this:
If you want to remain visible on Facebook, don’t mention the C word!
Nicky Kriel
Nicky Kriel is a Social Media Coach & Trainer inspiring, educating and empowering Business Owners to use Social Media more strategically. She is also the author of How to Twitter for Business Success. For more information visit http://www.nickykriel.com or to find out about her courses that she runs in Guildford visit http://www.nickykriel.com/courses
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Wow, really interesting thanks Nicky.
Very interesting…I did start noticing the “collapsing” with the word Thanksgiving…made me wonder why that was. Thanks for this post!
Hi Tamyka
The first time I noticed topics collapsing was when Steve Jobs died. I had written about posting manually on Facebook before, but they have made changes since then. http://www.nickykriel.com/blog/business-skills/3-great-reasons-to-post-manually-on-facebook/ Thank you for your comment.
Nicky x
Thank you Nicky. I now know what to avoid as well as other key words. I usually feed my tweets from facebook rather than the other way round – do you think this is better than tweets going into facebook?
Hi Naomi
I think Twitter can tolerate higher volume, but I against automate things too much. It is easy to forget that Twitter and Facebook are two different platforms with a slightly different language and different rules. I may be in the minority, but I update on each separate platform because it reminds me that they are different.
Nicky
Very useful. Hadn’t thought of this but you are so right… will bear this in mind for future posts from my page. Also passing this onto my colleagues!
Just when you think you’ve got it worked out, they go and move the goal posts. Thanks for this Nicky – useful to know about Networked Blogs and Foursquare too. I feed my blog posts to Facebook using Networked Blogs.
Thanks, Nicky. I’m so glad someone is following all this more closely than I am… and sharing!
Hi Allison
Thank you for stopping by and leaving a comment. I would love to broadcast this to everyone. I see so many friends making their posts less visible, sp I am glad that at least one more person knows about it.
Nicky
Thanks Nicky for sharing your valuable knowledge! Who would have thought these things can happen! (I’m obviously very naive). I shall remember not to use the C word. I wonder is the X word OK?
Hi Shona
The X word doesn’t seem to be used as much, but you could be creative with how you describe this time of the year.
Nicky