Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Fix for Facebook Chronological Posts on Page Issue

Yes, I'm sufficiently nerdy that the way Facebook has messed up the way posts are displayed on a Page's wall since the new Page design launched is driving me crazy. Luckily I'm not unique in this nerdiness; plenty of other Page admins are upset about it, too--so upset, in fact, that almost 11,000 have joined the Facebook-based movement to get things changed back to the way they were.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about here, the gist of it is that Facebook recently did its signature move of fixing something that wasn't broke to begin with: the way posts are displayed on a Page's newsfeed. It used to be that posts were displayed chronologically, so if you had your Page set up to display "everyone's" posts--as opposed to just your company's own posts--they appeared in reverse chronological order, with the most current at the top of the page. But Facebook decided that, even though the whole point of having a Page is encouraging "fans" to interact with the Page and with each other, they'd make it so the company's posts always appear at the top, and posts by others appear somewhere down the wall...in other words, where most people aren't likely to even see them.

It's stupid and crazy and annoying and hopefully something that Facebook will reconsider and change, but who knows when/if that will happen.

But luckily for us, there is an easy interim way around it: if you want to see wall posts in chronological order, just access Pages via your mobile device. On the iPhone, the wall posts display chronologically through both the Facebook app and the mobile browser view; on the iPad, they only display chronologically through the app. I would imagine the same is true for other phones/devices, but am not positive--if any of you have a Droid, Blackberry or other device, could you do me a favor and leave a comment about whether the same is true for those devices?

UPDATE: Forget this bootleg fix; apparently complaints from users hit critical mass because Facebook has fixed this issue for real now. Page admins can choose whether posts are ordered by Top Posts or Most Recent. Thanks Facebook!

No comments: