Important - Facebook Changes Dramatically Affect Our Readers

Image from Dangerous Minds.

Since the beginning of summer we noticed that the amount of traffic sent to our site from Facebook has been slowly declining. At first we just thought that perhaps people in the summer in Colorado were out hiking, biking, climbing, and drinking so there was less time to be online. I've heard from other beer bloggers the same thing, that during the summer the hits-per-day begins to decrease and that it picks back up in September. Unfortunately we've found that the trend is continuing and we've found some disturbing information about some recent Facebook changes that keeps our Facebook friends from seeing our posts. The sad thing is that this is happening to all FB pages, not just ours. We wanted to share these changes with you and give you, our readers and fans, some suggestions for ways to better stay up to date in light of these changes...

The website Dangerous Minds asks if what Facebook has done is the largest 'bait and switch' in history. Essentially a few months ago Facebook began a program where they ask page owners to pay to promote certain posts in order to receive more views. At the same time they began decreasing the amount of people that would see a a post that we make on our own wall that links to our website. Before the change I would estimate around 75% of our FB fans would see our FB posts, now only 15% of our fans see our FB posts.

For us, this is a bit of a bummer because when you 'like' our page on FB you are saying that you're interested in receiving our FB updates. If you can't see the updates and if we can't connect with you, then you're missing out on some of our updates about craft beer things in town, you're missing out on our stories and our reports about beer, you're missing out on all the events that we've organized, you're missing out on our educational articles, you're missing out on our hopes and ideas for growing interest in craft beer.

So, we have a couple options for you, we've figured out a few ways to make it easier to keep in touch. Here are a couple ways that you can make certain that you stay connected with us and that you know everything that's going on:

Subscribe to our blog via email or rss
Click this link if you would like to receive notifications of our posts sent directly to your email inbox. Anytime we post, you'll get an email at the end of the day. That might mean you get anywhere from 3-6 emails from us in a given week. If you choose this option, make sure to confirm your subscription with the follow up email. Another option is RSS subscriptions if you are familiar with RSS, here is our link.

Add us to your Interest List on Facebook
Facebook allows people to create Interests Lists for some of their favorite topics. Let's assume that you're interested in beer, you can create an interest list with all your favorite beer pages (including Focus on the Beer of course). Our posts will be more likely to show up in your main news feed,and you'll be able to view your new interest list (it will have it's own wall) and you won't miss anything. Here's how to do it.

1. Go to our FB page. 2. Like our page if you haven't already. 3. Hold the cursor over the box that says 'liked' and menu will show up that says something along the lines of 'add to interest list' or 'start an interest list.' 4. If you don't have a list, click on 'New List' and consider naming it Beer or Colorado Beer. 5. If you already have a beer interest list, add us to it.

Done! Now to view the list, go to your home page by clicking "Home" at the top. On the left side of your new Interest List should show up under the "Interests" heading. You may have to click on "More" to open up the option depending on the set up.

Visit our News Feed on Facebook
This is a bit less convenient than the other two options but we just wanted to mention it. Go to our FB Page and underneath our big cover photo you'll see an orange box titled "News." Click on that and you can see all our recent links to the Focus on the Beer site. If you do that on a regular basis (a few times a week) you won't miss anything.


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Stay up to date with Focus on the Beer. You can receive email updates and join us on our Facebook page.