The Silent Observers on Facebook

Since the constant fine tuning of Facebook Edgerank and its effects on Facebook business pages, one question I constantly encounter from creative business owners are: “Do I still need to bother with Facebook? I’m guessing Instagram or Pinterest is a better option.”

So, in my quest to figure out if Facebook is worth our time or not, I decided to do some experiments on my own Facebook page. Because even though many articles discuss various information and strategies, implementing these is more crucial to get the ‘Said’ results.

In my recent experiment with Facebook Organic reach I think I have proved that Facebook is not dead for businesses. But there’s one more reason why I stick to Facebook – it’s the power of the “Silent observers”. No other social media has this important piece of the jigsaw.

I have read a few articles about the ‘ Silent Observers’ on Facebook, but never realised the power of having these quiet followers who read every post, see every contest without clicking ‘Like’, ‘Comment’ or ‘Share’ no matter how engaging they might find the content. (You can track these silent observers for your Facebook Page with cool infographics from Visual.ly – We don’t see these observers in Facebook Insights.)

Many articles have been written on how to produce content that will convert these Silent observers to Active Followers.  So I decided to test this.  I started curating my content, sharing 4 posts a day during the week and 2 posts over the weekend, with a mix of different types of posts. But nothing happened – other than the Cool infographic from Visual.ly I learned nothing more and did not move any of my Silent Observers into action.

But I didn’t have to wait long to experience the power of these silent observers!

Recently when The Craft Gallery was nominated as one of the Finalist for Biz Mum Awards in two categories, we announced it as a status update on our Facebook page.  On average the life of a standard Facebook post is 90 mins maximum, and this was our first post which received traction for more than 36 hours!

Why….?

Finally all those Silent Observers have come out of the shell and liked the post, commented on it for the first time! We received some amazing supportive messages on the page which makes all those efforts worthwhile!  So, to all those people who have a love-hate relationship with Facebook:  get creative and keep building your tribe without getting too fussy about the analytics. Soon the silent observers will value your effort and become loyal followers!