Facebook is a great way to promote your content but you have to know how to do it the right way.

The first major thing you have to consider is that Facebook is constantly changing. What works for you this month can prove useless the next one. You have to learn to adapt and know this –Facebook are playing the game for the money. When you create a Facebook page you don’t have direct access to the people who liked your page. Facebook is just renting them to you. This means you can be kicked out any time without any warning and you can’t do anything about it.

How Facebook ticks?

Every time when you write with one of your friends, Facebook counts this as an interaction called edge.

The more you interact with your friends– send messages to them, like or comment their posts  – the bigger your edge rank with them gets. Basically it means that if Friend A with whom you interact frequently and Friend B with whom you interact rarely post a picture in the same time, you are going to see first the picture of Friend A. Because you interact more with Friend A, Facebook considers him more important to you. So we can say that this is some kind of a competition.

Most of the people using Facebook constantly like pages, photos, statuses and etc.  This means that the competition for their Facebook feed is greater.

Facebook gives priority to your friends. Very little of the Facebook pages that the users had liked are showing in their feed. We have to consider as well that the edge rank decays over time. So you can’t rely on old and frequently circulated content.

The same rules as the ones mentioned above are applicable for Facebook pages with one tiny annoying exception- you are actually outgunned in this game. Your Facebook page posts are not equal to the posts from the Facebook users. This means that if displayed at all your content will be displayed in the end of the feed of the people who liked your page.

So if you want your content to be seen by users who have liked your page you have two choices: providing good quality content and Facebook advertising.

Does high quality content matter?

There is one really annoying advice that you have been constantly given. Post original and high quality content. With great regret I have to agree with that one. If you want people to like your content and to interact with it by giving likes, writing comments and etc., it has to be very good. This way you can achieve an organic engagement. And more importantly you can form a group of passionate followers.

Sadly, in most cases great content is not the only precondition for success. In most cases you have to combine good quality content content with Facebook advertisement.

Facebook’s advertisement and promotion options

Facebook advertising is the way of Facebook saying “we own these people and you have to pay in order to have access to them”. So yes, in a way Facebook own us. Maybe someday they will become too greedy for their own good but we will see what the future holds. Although you have to pay for it, Facebook advertising is relatively cheap and offers great ways for targeting. After all, Facebook knows your interests just like Google stores every search query you make. This way you can target your audience more precisely according to their interests and hobbies.

Paying for Facebook likes?

Let’s say you write a blog or you own an E-commerce website. You can target users interested in the things you offer. My advice to you is: choose your audience carefully and don’t ever buy Facebook likes. Facebook has an inbuilt option for promoting your website. With great regret I have to inform you that it’s a waste of money. – Why? Because there are thousands of people from some Third World countries receiving payment for simply hitting the like button. As a consequence you get people who don’t care for your content and they are lowering your engagement and reach. Facebook considers these metrics when you post something on your page. The lower they scores the fewer people your content is being shown to.

There are websites offering real likes but you have to consider that they are affected by the same “fake like plague”. The results are the same and even worse as if you were using Facebook’s promoting option. You are paying more for something you can do yourself.

In summary, we need high quality content for great engagement, as well as determination and a budget for Facebook advertisement.

A piece of advice: Facebook is a great tool for advertisement but you need to develop all your marketing channels at the same time: Google, Google+, Twitter, Youtube etc. This way if you lose one of your networks you can still remain in the game – shaken but still alive.