I’ve noticed a new marketing ploy on Facebook. Suddenly it’s very popular for pages sharing recipes and DIY tips and tricks to encourage the reader, “hey save this to your page so you can find it later!”
Guess what? Unless you posted it in the last few days, you probably aren’t going to be able to find it later. It’s really just a way to get you to advertise their page. I don’t have any statistics to throw out there. It’s an educated guess based on the many posts showing up in my newsfeed advertising that way combined with the friends saving to their wall and then later posting about how they can’t find that great recipe/tip/trick/idea they posted about the other day.
What I’ve started doing is first I check their website. If I can quickly find it on there, I’ll pin it to Pinterest. It’s easier to find, especially now that you can search your own pins. I’ll probably even bookmark it the traditional way if it’s something I really don’t want to lose.
If I can’t find it on their website, I’ll go to Google and search on the title or keywords. I almost always find a similar version if not exact version that way. Then I pin and/or bookmark from there. It means somebody else is not getting traffic for your share, but it’s the only way to have a decent chance of actually finding it later.
I’m not saying don’t spread the page love on pages you really like. Just make sure you know that sharing it to your FB profile is not going to even come close to making sure you can find it later. ;)
I don’t click on most of the websites because I have a strog suspicion the recipe won’t be there. Why am I cynical? A recipe for pizza bites (loaded with cheese and pepperoni) with a “come lose weight with me” tag line at the bottom seems a bit off to me. :)