KickstarterForum.org

Just started our campaign two weeks ago and we've been using Facebook a lot to talk about updates and spread the word. I have over 400 "likes" or followers on my business page. We do have personal pages which we use to spread the word about the campaign, but there isn't a lot of overlap between my "personal" friends and my business "friends." In fact, until the campaign started I didn't really do anything with my personal page; just did posts about my business on the business page.

Just saw an article yesterday that Facebook is cutting down on the number of posts from Pages (business pages, not personal pages) that make it into peoples' homepage feed.
(This isn't the article I read, but a similar one that talks about it: http://adage.com/article/digital/facebo ... ng/245530/) I wonder how this change in FB policy will affect Kickstarter campaigns.

How do we overcome this? Do we have to start paying money to create ads, "boost" posts, etc?
If we have a budget, can you recommend a strategy for when to boost posts?

You're spot on, which is why I've always had a bit of a grudge with using facebook for business. Edgerank is super hard to beat consistently and I don't get why I should pay to reach all my followers when they've liked me and opted in to receive my content (if you pay for a promoted post, you will reach all of your followers). It also makes paying for likes via facebook less worthwhile.

That being said, it's a problem that needs to be solved on the marketer's front. Facebook is in the business of delivering the type of content it's users want in its feed. They want people to stay on their website and be engaged (like/share/comment).

You always see the posts that have broad appeal (buzzfeed, distractify) getting lots of visibility. Also the youtube videos or commercials that have broad appeal to a demographic like the dove commercials (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk) (women).

Essentially, to beat edgerank, you need to create content that 1. People want to share or 2. People want to receive and interact with (aiming for engagement over breadth).

You can have 200 facebook followers and 50 percent of them will view your posts (100) because they are super engaged, or 1,000 and only 20-50 receive your post in their feed because they have not been engaged in the past. The more you can drive people to engage with your content via your page, the more likely they will receive your content in the future.

I wrote a bit about creating sharable content here: http://www.crowdcrux.com/viral-marketin ... h-peretti/

Other useful articles:
http://www.reviewzntips.com/how-to-beat ... algorithm/
http://www.jonloomer.com/2013/04/10/bea ... ted-posts/

"You can’t do much about Decay. You post something, it gets older every minute and loses strength within EdgeRank.
Additionally, you can play around with Weighting by adding images and video, but to a certain extent there is only so much you can do.

But we can rig Affinity. We can make sure that our fans have a high Affinity for our page so that even when we’re not posting pictures of cute kids and pets our posts are being seen." - (From the one article above)

I'll think about your second question (when to boost posts) and get back to you. The simple answer is you should have a good idea of the ROI before sinking the money in.

One thing you can do right away: create an event on Facebook. That way, you can invite every one of your contacts, and they'll see it even if they don't regularly see your posts in their feed. I created an event for the last day of my campaign, and called it "Be A Part of Photographic History!" The explanatory text talks about the date as the last on which people can contribute.

We created a FB event, but I'm not sure is made much difference. Even though we called it a virtual event, no actual event, many people were confused and said they couldn't come, etc. Also, we created the event through the business FB page instead of the personal page. I think if we had used the personal page more people would have responded. I think we had around 800 invited to it by the end of our campaign... but only 20 or so "attending."

A few tricks I have been doing on my Facebook project page...

1) I make sure I use a picture or link. If I use a picture, I make sure the link to the Kickstarter page is prominent.

2) I make sure I SHARE that post on my personal account. Not just repost the link, but share the original post from the page.

3) I have two other pages and I make sure I share the post there as well.

4) I make sure a few friends do the same as well as "like" the post.

This obviously expands the reach of the posts to my friends circles but also encourages Facebook to show that post to more people that like my page.

I have been getting about 500%-600% times more impressions with this strategy.

@tom - Good tips. Thanks for sharing!!

If you can get 4-5 people to invite all the friends they have to the page- you will be surprised on how many likes you will get. When people are invited to something (like the others said up there, make an event) mos tof the time they will click like because it really is no effort at all on their end to support a friend.

@enhouse - Good point. You can also great a FB event, invite all your friends, and ask them to like it and share it.

Great tip. We will try it out for our campaign.

The time you post something also affects visibility, sunday afternoon was the best for me