The biggest problem of Facebook is the sheer number of news items which are filtered out if users are not actively engaged with them. For a page admin/business owner this means Facebook makes a poor job at reaching to my fans and potential customers unless I keep paying them money! I need two basic features to solve this problem.
Contact All Users App aka Newsletter
I need to be able to message my fan base like a newsletter with the following requirements in mind:
- Users have already liked the page, don't make them sign-up or follow anything else;
- Preferably use Facebook messages instead of email;
- Let them unsubscribe from the newsletter without going away/blocking the page;
The first one is straight forward - I've already put some money in promoting my page and collecting fans. No need for more hurdles to get started. For reference out of 500 users none has actually subscribed to the page. This gives you an idea how much they will subscribe to newsletters and such. They click LIKE and forget about it.
The second one is dependent on the target audience. I have the feeling that my target audience is reading Facebook messages much more than email.
My primary use case of this will be to send new offers and validation queries to the target audience in order to tailor the content and business to them.
Weekly Digest App
Looking at my Facebook page stats it is clear that only promoted content gets a higher reach. This includes both content paid for and content posted during periods where the page itself had an active advertisement.
This is no coincidence I think. When the page is promoted to new audience they will get around the available tabs, explore and like pictures and scroll down to see some of the older content. Assuming the person becomes a page fan they will fall into the previously described trap (content filter) and not see much of the page activity.
I need an application which will aggregate the content from the last week and send it to everyone. This app needs to:
- Be able to configure digest period/cut-off days and when to send the digest;
- Allow users to unsubscribe or alter their digest preferences;
Primary use case is to alert users of content which they may have missed.
- Bonus feature: exclude content which was seen by the specific person or they somehow reacted to it;
Where to next
I am actively looking for such kinds of apps but haven't found any yet. When time allows I will be looking at the Facebook API to see if this is at all possible to implement.
Any suggestions ?
Comments !