Avoiding negative feedback on facebook

I spend a lot of time on facebook and some posts can be annoying and irrelevant! There may not be a dislike button, but there are ways for your fans to tell you that they don’t like your content and this feedback can impact on your future page performance.

You may not have even have noticed it, but at the top right hand side of a post on the facebook news stream there’s a small button that a user can click to “hide” or “report story or spam”.

If a user clicks this button, then it’s considered by facebook as negative feedback, which makes the post less likely to show up in others news feeds as well as making it less likely for future posts to reach that user. Once you signal you dislike the post you can also opt to hide all stories from that page on your page, or even unlike the page altogether (probably the worst kind of feedback) as seen below.

Social Fresh reported the breakdown of negative feedback actions and how often Facebook users take each action as follows:

• Hide Post: 76%
• Hide All Posts From Page: 16%
• Report as Spam: 8%
• Unlike Page: <1%

According to Edgerank Checker – the typical facebook post receives 0.03% negative feedback with the highest feedback coming from travel and leisure, food and beverage and health and medical industries.

It’s important to recognize that not everyone will like the content you produce, and it’s often the posts that have the higher engagement that will also have the highest negative feedback.  The amount of negative feedback that you receive depends on a number of factors – audience size, industry type, whether you’re running a promotion or not, and frequency of your posts just to name a few.

The increased uses of memes (you know those cartoons that are regularly appearing in your news feed) are certainly driving up the negative feedback in many pages so if you are using these sorts of images, worth checking how your fans are impacted.

So how do you monitor negative feedback?

Keeping an eye on the negative feedback for your page is important as impacts the edgerank of your page and the ability for your content to be shown on the news stream of your fans. Yet for many page administrators, they don’t even realize that this is a key metric to measure and it’s more difficult to find to report on.

To view how much negative feedback you are receiving on your page you need to be a page administrator. Once you’ve clicked on the insights panel on the top of the admin section you need to have a look at the Insights home page and scroll down the page to the Page posts area that list your posts.

On the 4^th column of the table you’ll see a field called engaged users and you can click on each of the posts to see how many people have engaged as well as seeing what negative actions have resulted.

If you click on each of the posts you’ll be able to see how many people gave the post negative feedback as below.

You can also download your analytics into excel and see daily post feedback and track this on a daily basis.

This sort of analytics does not track sentiment but is a good guide to see what sort of posts are preferred by the fans on your page. Often when you see posts that are not relevant many ignore them, so if people take the time to hide and give you the feedback, you need to take note and learn from it.

How can you avoid negative feedback?

Some negative feedback is unavoidable but can be minimized.

• Think about the content before you post it – do you think it’s relevant and engaging for your audience? If not, then reconsider posting or think about how you can make it more compelling for your audience to consume.
• Target your posts – think about targeting ads to a specific geographic location – people don’t always want to know about events in other states if they are not relevant.
• Remember that images are often a main source of negative feedback (and yet still drive lots of positive engagement). Don’t go overboard using funny photos or memes that are not relevant to your fan base.

8 Ways to increase your facebook engagement

Have you just discovered what Facebook Edgerank is all about but not sure what the implications are? Here are 8 simple tips to help increase your engagement on your facebook page and have your content seen by a larger group of people:

1. Creating relevant and informative content is THE easiest way to increase the engagement on your facebook page and make sure that your content is seen. If the content is relevant, entertaining or informative, people will keep coming back for more.
2. Mix up the content – develop a content editorial calendar and make sure that you have a range of mediums covered in your posts – photos, videos, polls or short text both posts all appeal to different groups and should be included in the mix. It’s also useful to see what sort of post your fans respond to and base future posts on your learnings.
3. Have a range of everyday posts and extraordinary brand experiences – You need to make sure that you’re providing reasons for your fans to continue to engage. Make sure that your editorial calendar has some extraordinary brand experiences to keep people coming back. Reward them with exclusive fan discounts or events or run a competition that they can enter with the chance to win a prize. Remember that if you are running facebook promotions there are a number of guidelines to keep in mind and you can’t run a competition directly on your wall unless it’s hosted elsewhere (see earlier blog post on how to comply with facebook promotional guidelines )
4. Time of Post – people interact with your posts at different times of the day and it’s not always from 9-5pm on Monday to Friday that people are online. Use the facebook post scheduler to test how posts perform at different times of the day. I often find that it’s posts I put up late at night that drive the most interaction.
5. Post frequency – I often get asked how often should you post on your page. The answer is it depends on what content you have to communicate. Keeping in mind that many fans will never come back to your page once they have initially liked it, you need to think about how often you post. If only 10% of fans are seeing your content based on your edgerank score, then it won’t hurt to post more often if the content is good.
6. Ask for feedback – this is a two-way dialogue. Encourage your fans to comment, like and post on the page so that you’re driving further interaction. An interesting article was recently posted by Social Fresh about whether you should encourage likes or shares – have a read http://socialfresh.com/facebook-like-vs-share/
7. Measure and adapt – Facebook analytics gives page administrators some great information about how their fans are interacting with the page. Use this information to your advantage to be able to learn from your post interactions.
8. Ask fans to receive notifications from your page. There’s the option to ensure that pages are seen in your news feed. If you hover over the like button under the cover photo, you can click on the “get notifications button or to ensure that the page “Show in news feed”

A word on the paid promoted posts….

There’s been lots of controversy over the fact that you can also pay to promote your posts on the page by paid facebook advertising. Yes this is frustrating, but remember advertising on facebook is how they make money!  On occasion this can work and be effective, but use it as part of your overall content plan and not too often as some of this advertising can generate negative feedback for your page if the content is not relevant.

I’ve also found that I get greater interaction posting directly onto facebook rather than using third party automated apps like Hootsuite. It’s not confirmed that these third party apps are blocked or penalized by facebook in the edgerank scores (it’s often quoted as the case), but personally I’ve found better rates by posting directly.

Decoding facebook’s Promotional Guidelines

We’ve all seen brands on facebook make claims on their pages “first five people to comment will win a free bottle of wine” or “share this photo to win.’

Promotions on facebook are a great way of building engagement with fans and growing the number of people in your community.  However, for many page administrators it’s also a source of confusion. Many of the competitions and giveaways being run contravene the facebook promotional guidelines, and by breaking them, you’re running the risk that your promotion or even your page can be shut down.

Whilst it’s tempting to test the boundaries, I believe that the risks are not worth the consequences and there are some simple steps you can take to make sure you comply. Take the time to think through the promotion, make it more than just a post for a day and integrate it into your marketing strategy to achieve the best results.

The full link to the facebook guidelines gives you the rundown and you should revisit it often as facebook is known to change the rules.

I’ll attempt to give you the core things to think about when running a competition below:

1)    What’s considered a promotion?

If you’re going to pick a winner – then it’s considered a promotion. This means any contest, competition or sweepstakes offer

2)    Where can you run your promotion?

The guidelines state that competitions must be administered within apps  on facebook.com either on a canvas page or on a custom tab. This means you can POST about the promotion on the wall, but the competition must be hosted on a separate tab. You cannot run a give away by hosting on the wall and conditioning people to like or share a post to WIN.

3)    What about using facebook functionality to enter?

You must not use a “like” to enter as a voting mechanism for the promotion.  Some app’s on the pages can “like gate” the competition so that you need to be a fan of the page to enter (a good way of still building a community), but this is not about liking a post to be eligible to win.

4)    What does facebook require you to do before running the competition?

Facebook requires each entrant to release it from obligations and for the organization conducting the promotion to state that the promotion is not in any way sponsored, endorsed or administered by the social network. They must appear on the canvas pages or page tabs.

Facebook wants to reduce its liability and make sure it’s in no way connected with the promotion.

Many of the custom apps automatically post this on the bottom of the custom page “This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered or associated with Facebook. You understand that you are providing your information to XXXX and not to facebook. The information you provide will only be used for the XXX and will use the information provided in accordance with its privacy policy.”

5)    How can I select a winner?

You can’t randomly select a fan and award them a prize. As the guidelines note “the act of liking a page or checking into a place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.”

You’ll need to specify how you’ll choose a winner in the terms and conditions of the promotion (that’s right you will need to write some terms and conditions so that people know what the rules are).

When a winner is selected, you must notify them via email, postal address, mobile number etc rather than just positing the winner’s details on the wall.

6)    What are some apps I can use to run promotions on my page within the guidelines?

New apps are being built all the time to help companies run promotions on facebook. Many developers will also build custom pages that you can host on too.  Think about what your competition is designed for and then take a look at some of the apps to work out which one best meets your objectives. Some of the apps you may want to consider are:

• Wildfire. 
• NorthSocial.
• Strutta.
• Fan Appz 
• Bulb Storm
• Offer Pop
• Promo Box
• Buddy Media
• Tab Site

What else do I need to know:

Whilst there are guidelines for facebook, there’s also an obligation in many cases in Australia to obtain a permit to conduct the competition. Rules vary depending on the state that it’s being held in and the value of the prize, but you should contact your local office (NSW and ACT do require permits in many cases). Don’t forget if it’s a national promotion, you’ll need permits in each state.