If you don’t use Facebook just ignore this. It’s just an FYI I wish I’d known before.
I’ve had a couple of people recently ask me why I don’t blog anymore and that seemed weird because I’ve never stopped blogging but they insisted that they hadn’t seen anything from me on Facebook in forever and Victor also said he never sees my posts on Facebook saying that I have a new blog post out and I assumed they were just crazy but I thought I’d do an experiment just to see if Facebook was hiding my posts with links to my blog.
I posted two posts at the same time asking people to “like” if they saw it in their feeds. They were identical except one also had a link to my blog. Within four minutes the post without the link had 5 times more likes than the one with the link and Facebook was like, “This post is doing better than 95% of the other posts on your page so you should pay us to get it out to more people” and that seems ironic since it was a post showing that Facebook was kinda being a dick, but whatever.
Final numbers 2 days later:
Post with a link in it ~ 4.4k likes. (Facebook says 26k people reached)
Post without a link in it ~ 12k likes. (Facebook says 57k people reached.)
Lovely people who understand Facebook more than I do explained it’s an algorithm issue because Facebook doesn’t want to show stuff that has links because it makes you leave Facebook, but that you can get around it a bit by instead putting the link in the first comment of the post, so I tried that and asked people to “like” if they saw it and it got 9.4k likes (66k people reached). That seems pretty definitive. I decided to share this with you in case you’re having the same issues, although probably by the time I write this Facebook will also find a way to hide any posts that links in the comments too or just erase me from existence. Hard to tell.