Hard Times for Facebook Page Owners?
January 25th, 2012
Remember all that money your organization, campaign or company spent on Facebook Ads designed to build a following for your Facebook Page? Well, that real estate is steadily losing its value:
With the introduction of the “subscribe” feature, Facebook’s news feed has begun favoring posts and activity from subscriptions over posts from fan pages. This means it has become even more difficult to get content from your fan page seen in your followers’ news feeds. So what now?
M&R’s Amy Peyro has some specific suggestions in her article for boosting the performance of your Facebook posts, but really, this entire situation is pretty damn frustrating for online communicators. Facebook is happy to take our money, but after cashing the checks they’re equally happy to change the rules to significantly cut the value of that investment: if the fans we paid to reach don’t see our content as often, each click on an ad is functionally worth less.
Yet another illustration of the danger of relying on a third-party platform for advocacy! If you don’t own the list, you don’t own the list — and the company that DOES own it can do what it wants with something you spent time and.or money building. Zuckerberg wants vendor-neutral channels like email to fade away in favor of means of communication he owns? Hey buddy, I know what’s in it for YOU, but why should WE go along?
– cpd
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2 Comments Add your own
1. Kerri Karvetski | January 25th, 2012 at 4:48 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s especially frustrating for orgs that don’t advertise, that used to get some good traction with engaging posts but are now slipping into newsfeed oblivion.
Here’s another strike against pages – you don’t even have to like the page to comment on or like a post. Where’s the enticement to like the page then?
2. Stan Olshefski | January 25th, 2012 at 6:36 pm
The recently updated page Insights seem to put more emphasis on ad impressions — see Weekly Reach.
The other big change was hiding the demography, and raw page Like and Unlike stats — relegating these to a download.
It’s great that the download with more data is available, but it’s clear that Facebook wants to do a little more work to find this data.
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