Formulas for Relevance

With great irony only a couple of days after my last post on Facebook’s new promote feature, I posted a new photo to my Facebook page and it wasn’t even relevant to me! Seriously, the only place my own post on my page appeared to me was in Facebook’s Ticker sidebar!

I thought for a second, maybe Facebook flipped me to the “Top Stories” view and I hadn’t noticed. Nope, I was on most recent view and no amount of refreshing my browser brought my own page post into my personal news feed. And this is my problem with Facebook’s Edgerank feature. I don’t per se mind having a way to view the popular items that have gotten a lot of likes or a lot of comments. In fact, sometimes when I’ve been away a few days, I find it’s an excellent way to get a brief catch up on what happened. I don’t think many of us have time to scroll through days worth of posts, sometimes not even hours of posts.

However, it’s positively diabolical to me that Facebook provides no clear way to have an unadulterated view of the posts from our friends and the pages and people we follow. And I suspect that most users would think they are seeing just such a view at least when they are looking at their news feed sorted on most recent. Yet, I’ve had several instances now where I’ve checked pages that I like and see recent posts from those pages that never appeared in my own news feed.

Of course, there is a work-around to this by putting your pages and friends into friend lists and/or interests lists, but how many people really use them, not just create lists but actually use them to read? This is mere intuition, but I’d bet not many. Basically I think you’re talking power users here, not the majority. And for that majority, Facebook believes their formulas are best at deciding what is relevant to you…

And thus the reason I hope that I can convince the people who have followed my page to instead subscribe to my personal updates. Facebook pages are so marginalized in the new order that its a losing battle. As one individual not a company with a vast budget and a legion of employees, I simply don’t have the time to live on Facebook fighting to stay relevant to the people who already said I was relevant to them by liking my page in the first place.

For those of you followed my page or just stumbled across me and like my art and photography, please subscribe to my updates on Facebook by clicking the subscribe button below! Edgerank still intervenes, but it seems less severe and it allows me to concentrate my efforts.

Mark E Tisdale | Create Your Badge

Also consider subscribing to my art blog via email. It’s not a daily dose or anything but you will get occasional highlights from my art blog and the odd surprise like the reader this month who got a free print to hang in her home!

Ironically, this is the second post on the subject where I’ve had a few more thoughts on the subject to express that just didn’t fit the message, so there will be at least one more post on the subject! Fair warning, eh?