To our followers on Tumblr, I apologize for having to post this detailed discussion of how to work with our Facebook page - I need a place to store this post for reference so that our other pages can link to it safely. Thanks for understanding!
How to keep The Earth Story in your feed
We’re often asked why we’ve disappeared from our readers’ feeds. The reason is that Facebook heavily filters which posts appear in people’s news feeds based on a complicated algorithm they’ve developed. Unfortunately, this fact means pages like The Earth Story have to find other ways to appear in our readers’ news feeds and occasionally remind people of how to do so.
There are many ways to make sure our posts appear; a few work 100% of the time and others work most of the time. If you’re a reader of this page, we hope you’ll try them.
First, every single post that appears on our Facebook feed is reproduced at our blog, http://the-earth-story.com/, and is linked at our twitter feed, http://twitter.com/theearthstory. If you follow either of those, you’ll see every post, in addition to unique content at both locations.
Of course, not everyone uses those networks. There’s a way to guarantee you can find every Facebook post from both The Earth Story and our sister page The Universe; follow this list: https://www.facebook.com/lists/666919496702431 That list will appear under “interests” in the bar on the left hand side of your Facebook feed. Every time a post appears, a number will show up next to it telling you that there’s a new post to scroll through. If you click a menu next to that list, you can even “favorite” it, which moves it to the top of the menu at Facebook’s left hand side like you see in one photo. You can also make your own interest list at our page as well and get the same result.
If you’re not a fan of lists, there are other tricks. First, look at the last image posted. See where there’s the option to “see first”? If you select that, you’re telling Facebook to put this page’s content at the top of your news feed. This is a new option they’ve just introduced; we’ll see how well it works.
Beyond the “see first” option, make sure you’ve selected both “liked” and “following” on our page, that helps a lot in making posts appear in your news feed. If you want a warning every time a post appears, you can even use the pulldown menu shown to get an alert that The Earth Story posted a new photo. We’ve heard from several people that they do this and Facebook resets their settings eventually, but it usually works for a while.
Finally, if you’re not up for an alert, the last trick is “clicking like, share, and commenting on a bunch of posts”. Facebook’s algorithm sees these clicks and gives you more of our content when you do that. It’s not guaranteed and they will still hide some posts, but it works decently well. Changing Facebook’s News Feed setting from “top stories” to “Most Recent” on their homepage (shown in the 3rd photo) also helps, but clicking like as often as possible really does make a difference.
We’re sorry we always bug you about this problem, but we miss you as readers and commenters, and we’d love to have more of you back! Hopefully putting down all these details helps with that.
-The Earth Story team
