Facebook death grip making it hard to do business

[kegnum]

I've been using FB for about a year now. Used their ads to help build up a large fan base. Over the course of about 12 months they have been showing my updates to less and less people. Though I know that they are not all going to be winners I do get a decent amount of likes and comments. They keep pushing for people to promote their posts but its for a ridiculous amount of money.

I paid for about 75% of these fans and the rest came from our site. They are not fake or inflated in any way. I spend about $20 - $40 a day on FB ads and at this points its hardly worth it. I feel that that charged me for the fans and now are trying to charge me again to interact with them. I have gotten emails from people asking me why I haven't been posting on FB and I respond by explaining to them how to go about changing their settings to allow them to see all of our updates and now it seems that these settings go back to the default with every FB update (happens more often than you think).

I guess I am just curious if others are dealing with the same issues. How have you handled it? Do you use any other social networks with success ( epically if you are paying for ads). Any feedback would be appreciated. I'm bout ready to abandon them completely.

 

[SkyrocketSEO]

Yes, this started for me a couple of months ago. From average 100K -150K we went down to average of 30-40K as you can see on this screenshot. That's with 108K real fans
I used to reach 500K people with a single post. This is not possible now

 

[Wilson Grant Fisk]

Yes, this started for me a couple of months ago. From average 100K -150K we went down to average of 30-40K as you can see on this screenshot. That's with 108K real fans
I used to reach 500K people with a single post. This is not possible now
View attachment 42431

The Cock did make me laugh.

 

[zeetee]

let me do math.. if u paid 30$ on average per day to FB then it must cost u 30x365days=10950$ to get those 24k fans of which 25% are still fetched through your own website. and now only around 1% can see your updates. just assume out of those 250 ppl, how many actually click on your post. FB is more than a money drain nowadays.

 

[netmoney1]

Couple good reads (older, but still good) about Mark Cuban's view on FB: (the first one hits on exactly what you are experiencing - charging to properly interact with your fans.

http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-posts-are-driving-away-brands#awesm=~opbx4n4G8IMsKk (good screen shot of what FB wanted to charge the Mav's for a post to reach their fans)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-cuban/facebook-sponsored-posts_b_2158116.html

 

[SkyrocketSEO]

Let's not forget that this is probably the best time to buy FB stocks....Their income will go up up up. They are doing something similar to Google. Trying to monetize everything and everywhere, and every click

 

[kegnum]

let me do math.. if u paid 30$ on average per day to FB then it must cost u 30x365days=10950$ to get those 24k fans of which 25% are still fetched through your own website. and now only around 1% can see your updates. just assume out of those 250 ppl, how many actually click on your post. FB is more than a money drain nowadays.

It was about 30 a day... not all for that page although I do have similar results. Sorry I should have made that clear.

Couple good reads (older, but still good) about Mark Cuban's view on FB: (the first one hits on exactly what you are experiencing - charging to properly interact with your fans.

http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mar...are-driving-away-brands#awesm=~opbx4n4G8IMsKk (good screen shot of what FB wanted to charge the Mav's for a post to reach their fans)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-cuban/facebook-sponsored-posts_b_2158116.html

Thanks a lot, we read them later.

Let's not forget that this is probably the best time to buy FB stocks....Their income will go up up up. They are doing something similar to Google. Trying to monetize everything and everywhere, and every click

Thanks guys. SkyrocketSEO not sure about the stock thing, unless you are going short term. Sure google charges for traffic but they don't charge you for a visit and again to allow the customer to buy something. This is not a good idea for a long term business plan. I don't know if you have even seen how much they are looking to charge to promote a post but its ridiculous. I am pretty sure that companies that are looking to promote their FB pages are going to stop and other than the other ads that they promote are pure spam. But thats just MHO who knows. All I know is a need a new platform.

Yes, this started for me a couple of months ago. From average 100K -150K we went down to average of 30-40K as you can see on this screenshot. That's with 108K real fans
I used to reach 500K people with a single post. This is not possible now
View attachment 42431

So sad yet so hilarious. Thanks for putting a smile on my face.

I am pretty much moving on to something less. My sites still get a good amount of traffic from word of mouth, my email list and twitter. Was just nice to promote using FB if things hadn't gone to shit I would have been able to double my income.

 

[kegnum]

"The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or subscribers because we can't reach them all. Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That's crazy." -Mark Cuban

EXACTLY. People are going to leave. long term this is a huge mistake on their part. IMHO

 

[netmoney1]

"The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or subscribers because we can't reach them all. Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That's crazy." -Mark Cuban

EXACTLY. People are going to leave. long term this is a huge mistake on their part. IMHO

Look at the image in that article - they wanted $3k - $4k to reach a million fans - sure, a NBA team probably isn't paying for each fan...BUT it is pages like a pro sports team that keeps FB users coming back and engaged...think if all team pages, movie pages, celebrity pages, etc went away - FB would die a slow death - those things are part of the draw. People can only take so much of their friends posting their BS, drama and opinions. It is pages like Mark's NBA team that people want to interact with.

FB knows the ship will eventually sink...that is why they paid $1 Billion for Instagram...and offered $3 Billion for SnapChat (that kid is a fu#king idiot for turning down $3 Billion by the way lol)

 

[brickharbor]

 

[kegnum]

 

[azguru]

I agree. This is terrible business practice. Personally, if I want to promote a post, I have to choose wisely and hope that it has viral potential so I can increase my organic reach. Therefore, only viral posts that are much broader than the theme of my niches get promoted. This can lower the quality of a niche page.

Facebook can say it is to combat spam, but there are already measures in place for that. If you are "spamming" your audience with too many posts, they will unlike your page. If they don't unlike the page, they obviously don't mind your posting frequency.

Plus, promoted posts do not stop spamming. It just means you have to pay for (what facebook would call) spamming. So now, only the rich "spammers" have that power.

I guess it is a little bit different if you send the likes to your page from somewhere other than Facebook. In that case, Facebook is technically doing you a "service" by giving you a new place to promote. But, when you are promoting with Facebook Ads to get your fans, it is ridiculous to have to keep paying to reach your audience. Facebook pages are supposed to be owned media. FB's new rules turn pages into about 15-20% owned media and 80-85% paid media, thus lowering the appeal of Facebook promotion significantly.

This may cause a shift away from page promotion and lead people to send FB users directly to their money sites/offers right away. From Facebook's perspective this is bad. Facebook should want to keep visitors on Facebook. After all, when you promote a page, you are essentially paying Facebook to promote a Facebook URL - that alone is good news for Facebook.

However, since we have no control over this, the only thing we can do is adapt.

I have adjusted my strategy accordingly.

From now on, when I am entering a new niche, I consider whether it would be better to create a page or promote offers directly. If there are only a few profitable offers in my niche, I will run them directly and skip the hassle of making a page.

If there are a lot of profitable offers in my niche, I will create a Facebook page. Of course, these profitable offers need to actually provide utility to my page users in order to maintain the quality of the page.

Instead of thinking of pages as owned media, I think of them as a form of lead generation. They allow you to find the people on Facebook that are active in your niche. These are the people that "like" your page and remain active on the page. Essentially, it is like building a custom audience for retargeting. You know these people will have an interest in your niche, so when it comes time to promote an offer, you can utilize the promoted posts feature to create a native advertising campaign that will have higher click-through rates and conversion rates (hopefully). Additionally, you are building credibility with your custom audience by promoting quality content regularly, which will go a long way when it comes time to promote.

 

[kegnum]

I agree. This is terrible business practice. Personally, if I want to promote a post, I have to choose wisely and hope that it has viral potential so I can increase my organic reach. Therefore, only viral posts that are much broader than the theme of my niches get promoted. This can lower the quality of a niche page.

Facebook can say it is to combat spam, but there are already measures in place for that. If you are "spamming" your audience with too many posts, they will unlike your page. If they don't unlike the page, they obviously don't mind your posting frequency.

Plus, promoted posts do not stop spamming. It just means you have to pay for (what facebook would call) spamming. So now, only the rich "spammers" have that power.

Totally agree with this. I guess "we are protecting from spam" sounds better than "we are sucking you fry". I also noticed that they are trying to get me and other people I know to promote status updates on our personal pages. I hope this is because I have an ad account with them because if they expect the average person to pay to share a pic of their kids first day of school pic... they are going to die out faster than I thought.

However, since we have no control over this, the only thing we can do is adapt.

Unfortunately that is the bottom line.

 

[azguru]

Totally agree with this. I guess "we are protecting from spam" sounds better than "we are sucking you fry". I also noticed that they are trying to get me and other people I know to promote status updates on our personal pages. I hope this is because I have an ad account with them because if they expect the average person to pay to share a pic of their kids first day of school pic... they are going to die out faster than I thought.

That is the downside to being a publicly traded company. Investors only see dollar signs, which can cause companies to take extreme measures to boost profits. Sure, you can make more money in the short term, but you are compromising the quality of your products which never ends well. If only companies could see that.

It's nice to see support from Mark Cuban on this matter. If more big names start speaking up, maybe change will be foreseeable.

Unfortunately that is the bottom line.

Yeah. I started building pages recently, so I've been aware of what I was getting myself into. I would be pissed if I owned a large page and they pulled out this rule all of a sudden.

Good luck adapting!

 

[Joak]

Totally agree with this. I guess "we are protecting from spam" sounds better than "we are sucking you fry". I also noticed that they are trying to get me and other people I know to promote status updates on our personal pages. I hope this is because I have an ad account with them because if they expect the average person to pay to share a pic of their kids first day of school pic... they are going to die out faster than I thought.



Unfortunately that is the bottom line.

I think all of this is because Facebook practically monopolizes the market. Where can you get similar paid social traffic? Google does not give you proper social ads and the G+ they keep trying to shove up people's throats suck. Linked In is super expensive. (At least from my experience).

I think the hope is with twitter. I think their ad platform still haven't gone public but when it does, in all countries, I think it'll be a very nasty rival for Facebook.

For now, I pretty much do exactly as suggested above. Direct offer promotion, offer promotion through sponsored post links, and using likes as retargeting data. It used to be sort of like a mailing list. You push a button and you reach everyone. Not anymore, if you adjust your mindset to that you'll be able to adapt your campaigns accordingly.

As for new platform suggestions, I'm curious to see what kind of suggestions pop up. Though I don't really see a "qualified" platform for paid ads at this time.

 

[CyborgX]

Most of these posts here have been really insightful. I own a few big Facebook fan pages myself and since the last two months or so, it's all been spiralling downhill. Especially the recent update has literally killed organic reach and their statement about quality content being promoted is just balls. No matter what we post, the reach is at least 70% less than it used to be.

Facebook wants you to cough up money to reaching even a fraction of your own fans, and it's a LOT of money, more than we could ever afford to pay since our fan base runs into hundreds of thousands. Although these kind of schemes might make them short term money, but in the long term they will suffer huge consequences. Am already looking into other platforms as Facebook is becoming more and more confined with every passing week.

Really sad considering how powerful a social tool it used be till recently. Oh well, we need to adjust and survive but I hope these restrictive changes are not permanent.

 

[kegnum]

First of all, I would just like to say that I do not recommend repeating what I have done because I am unsure of the long term ramifications.

In my particular niche I would post about 10 to 12 times per day, give or take. Due to the fact that non of my fans are seeing my posts I have automated the process and am repeating posts throughout the day. I am now posting closer to 200 posts a day randomly 24/7. I have also made it as clear a possible that I will no longer be answering questions via FB as they have made it impossible for the average person to run a page. I told them that I will be posting the same post multiple times throughout the day so that more people can see them and the reason for it. I told them all that over the course of a few months (nothing written in stone) that i will be moving from facebook altogether.

While I will never leave facebook as long as it is profitable I will only use my existing pages for pure spam.

So far the profits from my pages have reach over 150% of what they were making months ago and my Twitter page went from 168 followers to 400+ and counting. I also have gotten over 1K subscribers to my new email list.

Basically I am scraping as many followers (that i paid for) from FB and moving them somewhere that I have more control.

I am using http://www.nextscripts.com/ a plugin for wordpress (my posts are all shares from my wordpress site). They allow you to automatically repost posts to FB and others as often as you want.

Although I am basically squeezing whatever life is left in my FB pages. I have tried to explain to my fans the reasoning behind it and most of them seem to understand.

Hope this is of some help to you guys. Good Luck and never give up!!!!!