Facebook Stomps Out Sending Messages to "All" Fans

Man in a crosswalk. Argg!!!. Don´t step on me!!! Until recently, internet retail marketers were discovering blogs like this, How To Send A Message To Facebook Fans and When To Use It . It’s always fun to learn new and useful Facebook tips, especially when it comes to how to send messages to all Fans on a Facebook page. What a great feature! That’s right, you could once use a nice little tool called marketing to direct message Facebook Fans.

Many retailers know that marketing messages posted on a business Facebook Page just aren’t seen by everyone (not even close), so naturally marketers who knew about this hidden “send messages to all Fans” function were using it to put marketing messages in every fan’s inbox.

Unfortunately, Facebook recently cut that nifty marketing feature, as reported by this All Facebook site article: News Flash: Facebook Pages Can’t Send Messages. No one knows why it was stomped out, but the guess is that perhaps Facebook saw it as overly spammy and wanted to keep the conversation on the Page (not to mention drive more marketers to using Facebook ads).

Now, all you can do to reach your Fans is post messages to the Page status, or go the ads route, but neither is nearly as personal as the now defunct marketing feature. We’re sad to see the all-fan messaging feature go, especially since it will cost online retailers more to maximize their Facebook.

How are you working around the new changes to maintain Facebook marketing performance? Or, does it make no difference at all for you (who didn’t know about the feature in the first place?)?

Posted by in Social Media on Dec 15, 2011
12 Comments

Article by Jonathan Poston

To date, Jonathan has written 403 articles for Fast Pivot.
  • Marco

    It makes things more complicated and less visible, this is undeniable. But, I think, if many hadn’t “overused” this feature the decision by Facebook wouldn’t have been taken. We must admit that a lot of retailers used it to spam personal pages and this will make things even more interesting finding ways of engaging our customers/users. Social media experience is growing, and we must grow our communication skills with it.

  • jkinnisch

    That’s not to say it couldn’t return some day.

  • http://www.holygroundfarm.org Jean Logan

    Actually it is much worse than that. When I put an ad on Facebook to get my self help book out I was able to update the people with comments. Now if you look at my page “Unlocking the Power of Glyphs” you might believe I have over 5,000 fans but not only is the message capability gone, if I post a comment, not more than a couple hundred receive the posting. Their figures are meaningless if you can’t reach these people. I have paused my ad and will not run it again as even when I do, I suspect Facebook has someone clicking on ads to earn money. Not one person has posted a comment from the ad in a long time but the money keeps disappearing. Even when I post a comment that if they do not have the money to buy a book, let me know, I hear nothing back.

    • Jonathan Poston

      Thanks for comment, Jean. Agreed, the effectiveness of Facebook marketing seems to have plummeted…over the last year, it’s been a nosedive. If we cover this subject again, we may include your quote (we have seen similar metrics, and it’s just sad)…what’s next for internet marketers seems to be up in the air, but it’s definitely a good time to dust off the email list and keep growing your own networks (ones that won’t have the rug pulled out like FB keeps doing to “Page owners.”)

      P.S. Twitter seems to be heading down the same path (people just aren’t tuned in to social like they were, it’s saturated with competition, and the platforms make changes that marginalize traffic).

  • http://aalbc.com Troy Johnson

    What is the point of having a fan page if you can’t send a message to each of your fans?

    Obviously providing this feature, cannibalizes FaceBook’s ability to sell ads. The spam argument, while it sounds righteous, does not hold water because it is too easy for a person to simply block or “unlike” the offending entity.

    Now that Facebook is a publicly traded firm, these types of issues will become more problematic.

    • Jonathan Poston

      Exactly Troy! If one of the main reasons businesses join FB in the first place is effectively obviated, then what’s the point in being there? Sure, there are still branding / interaction opportunities, but stripping such a big value add out, under the pretenses of preventing spam, etc. seems like a bad move on FB’s part, esp. with so many other social media platform options cropping up.

  • http://sunrainor.blogspot.com Finola

    I agree that this is a bad move - I have rebranded and wanted to just let people who are my old fans know to change to the new page…and hardly anyone has done so by my posting on my page wall.
    It’s counterproductive - I don’t like spam and too many messages but taking the feature out it too much.

  • http://silenciobarnes.com SilencioBarnes

    Yup. Thought I was missing something. I just crafted this whole update email for my fans only to find out that the ability to send is no longer in facebook. Broke my heart. Found this post while searching for if it was just me or if FB just hid the option elsewhere.

  • Mayra

    So, bottomline, is there any way to send a message to all fans? Do I need to go back to creating a FB “group”? This is so confusing. We went from a group to a fan page because we were told that was the way forward. But are you saying there is no way of sending an announcement to all oru likes? Everyone says, just send it to yoru ocntacts. Yeah, but my contacts are a mix of business , family friends, ect… My personal contacts have no interest in hearing about our next business meeting, etc… Am I missing something?

    • Jonathan Poston

      To date, it appears that the “sending a message to all Facebook fans option” has not been restored. The reason many social media professionals were suggesting a Fan Page as a way forward was because there is no limit on the amount of fans you can have, and because search engines index those posts. Groups aren’t intended for business promotions, as an update going to members every time a post is made would most likely send customers packing, so wouldn’t suggest moving back, unless the updates are extremely useful. It is becoming more evident that to really get ahead at the Fan Page level, there will be advertising and other fees involved. Many very engaging pages (not advertising) are seeing less than .5% engagement, and up to 10% reach.

      However, this has opened a unique opportunity for email campaigns to make a comeback, especially when open rates range between 15-25%, considerably more than social media reach.

  • http://latterdaylearning.org Peter Knecht

    We use Ning.com for all our marketing now. Facebook is simply a mirror of what we do with at Ning. I highly recommend it! Very good service and you have complete access to our “network”…what a novel idea.

    • Matthew Ledford

      Thanks for contributing! Ning is a great hub with lots of features for the price! It and Joomla are Drupal’s cool wysiwyg cousins! Hub spot also bears watching in that space too.