This Means War: #Facebook vs. #Brand Pages
How Facebook Decided to Demand Ransom for Access to Our Own Fans
I have a bone to pick with Facebook. In fact, I have a big bone to pick with Facebook.
Sometime in 2007, I registered on Facebook. Adding “everyone” I could find at the time yielded about 62 friends on Facebook; to be accurate, there were 62 of my actual address book contacts that had registered on Facebook, though most people were still interacting on MySpace more frequently. Today, I have about 700+ “friends” on Facebook, about half I know quite well, most of the other half I've met once or twice in person, and a handful of people, I've never met in my life. (And probably never will.)
Before Facebook allowed for subscriptions to anyone’s page recently, the options were limited: accept as a “friend” or reject the friend request. To this day, I hesitate to approve friend requests from people I don’t know. It was awkward, especially when you've published a book and someone who read it wants to just be “friends” on Facebook, but from my perspective, they also don’t need to know that I fell face-first into the sidewalk that morning in front of a celebrity, which I very well may post on my personal page. I know I can edit the viewing level of each post, but that’s an additional step I don’t want to take. (With subscriptions, that problem has been eradicated. If I could, I’d go throw a bunch of “friends” into my subscribers bucket.)
So when company/brand pages came to my attention back in 2008 or so, it was like my life’s purpose became clear; this was a way that many of us with brand assets could keep up with our “fans” and engage with them consistently without having to divulge personal information about ourselves, and without having to know the majority of our “fans” in person. All we, as page owners and managers, wanted was to continue our relationship and build loyalty with our fans; all the fans wanted was to keep up with the companies and/or products they “liked”.
Today, I manage a good selection of brand pages. As a marketing person with significant experience in all things social — I manage corporate brands, personal brands, and other specific-interest pages on Facebook. Each post, I monitor carefully to see how many views it gets, “likes” it receives, how many clicked through, and if it receives any comments and if so, who are these people? Where are they from? How often do they engage with this page?
More importantly, over the last several years, those of us who have brand pages have worked tirelessly acquiring new “fans” and striving for consistent engagement on our postings. Be it on other social networks, our printed marketing assets, our digital assets or via live events—we had a Facebook page and a Twitter handle, and we earned those customers’ “likes”. We now have “social media managers” as regular positions in companies; if you work in marketing, not having mastery in some aspect of social media would be a big minus.
So then, I ask you this, Facebook:
What made you think, after all the work that we put in to procure these fans, that it would be okay for you to choose who sees and doesn't see our brand page postings?
Let’s Look at the Examples
We’ll start with a page that has only 250 likes—which, by page standards, is really not a lot of fans. It’s a social “club” page — mostly event announcements that I make and other topic-related fun postings. Depending on how many social events I’m doing that month, I can post to this page anywhere between 1-2 times a week, or every other month or so.
To give you a little history, this is a page mostly made up of people I know, and then people they know that saw their engagement with the page, or were told to join by their friend.
As shown above, when I promote the posting (via payment to Facebook) — 1,625 people saw the post. When I don’t promote the post — of the 250 fans/likes on the page, 10 saw the post. In other words, when I don’t pay the $5 per post that Facebook charges to promote posts on this page with ONLY 250 likes, Facebook then allows 4% of the fans to actually see the post.
Keep in mind the majority are actually friends of mine who are also fans of this page. This would also mean engagement levels would generally be higher—not lower. Now, unless I pay Facebook, I have access to only FOUR PERCENT of them when I post. Without views, how is anyone supposed to know about the posting or the event? (In my case, I end up sharing it on my personal page since both can access the same group, but I digress.)
Now, let’s see another page. It has a significantly larger fan-base with almost exactly 1,400 likes/fans. The page is much more active as far as postings go; generally, I post to it approximately 3~4 times per week. Put aside the number of likes or shares, as that’s entirely driven by the quality and relevance (or lack thereof) in my individual posts — but focus on how many people actually saw these posts shown above.
After all, how am I supposed to engage anyone if they don’t see the post, Facebook?
When I don’t promote the post with payment (shown in the first clipping), I end up with 39 of 1,400 fans who were able to see this post. Lest this not be clear — that is precisely 2.785% of the pages fans who were able to even SEE the post, never mind like or comment on the posting. When I pay to promote the post, a minimum of 761 (54%) or up to 2,202 people (that would be 157%) see the post.
Now, let’s go to the page with the most number of likes: over 4,100,000 likes at this time. FOUR MILLION.
The image above is a typical photo posting on the page. Of the 4 million fans, exactly 37,760 were shown the posting. I can round up and tell you that 1% of the fan-base saw the page but it was actually less: exactly 0.092% of the fan-base saw the post.
But let’s take it a step further:
As you can see, 192 people shared this post so a decent chunk of the 37,760 users who saw this status update were not from the page’s existing fans but rather, the fans’ friends. So left alone without shares, it was even a smaller percentage than the measly 0.09% that Facebook allowed for fans to see on their newsfeeds.
You might be wondering what happens to this page when you boost a post. Right about now, you might be thinking: “Why isn’t she showing the boosted example?”
Well, folks, there’s a good reason for that.
Get a load of this:
It costs $8,000 to do the following:
(1) Reach the friends of your own fans that you already acquired (which is understandable)
AND
(2) ACTUALLY reach your OWN fans (past the <0.09% Facebook reaches for you without charging you) that were already EARNED by hard work and heavily promoting the page
That’s right, $8000 per post.
I have this issue with companies these days that ask for free content, and then allow for absolutely no benefits to the people providing the free content. They continue to make money off of your content, but then should you post your own website link, or a call-to-action that could lead a user to an external site — they immediately yank it.
Take companies like Yelp.
They want everyone to come and post write-ups about companies, restaurants and other services on their website. Then you take that content to those services, and sell ads to them. Meanwhile, if any one of your content contributors (who work for free, by the way) posts a link to their own site or blog within the content you’re selling to other folks, the whole post gets yanked, claiming it goes against Yelp’s Terms of Service (TOS). Basically, THEY can benefit and actually profit from your content, but you may not get one click from your own content.
Then there are companies like Medium — where you’re reading this post right now. I have my own blog or websites, but I’m giving Medium a try. I’m not big on providing free content to companies, but this gives me a good platform by which I can share content that falls outside of my topic-specific blogs or sites — and I can link back to my website or blog as many times as I want, and Medium doesn't yank the posting. Thus, I’m willing to give it a try.
So, looping back to Facebook….here’s the bone I want to pick.
Before I’m a Facebook page manager or owner, I’m a Facebook user. I have visited and liked “x” number of pages, and chose to follow them. I’ve already said I have 700 Facebook friends; let’s assume I follow 200+ brands or pages (I really have no idea how many I follow). Each one of those pages, I liked because I want to follow them and be aware of what is happening with them,their industry, or what have you.
I CHOSE TO FOLLOW THESE PAGES.
So what made you think it’s okay for you to decide whether you show me their postings or not?
I grant you that between 700+ “friends” and 200+ brand pages, my newsfeed may become chaotic. Of the 700 friends, I’ve probably used the “HIDE FROM NEWSFEED” option for about 35% of them, and of the brand pages, I go and unlike a few pages every other week once they have proven to be useless to me (or annoying…or ridiculous) and removed them from my newsfeed also. It’s a newsfeed I have customized for me and my own preferences.
So why are you not allowing me to see the brands’ postings? (Click to tweet.)
Once I have liked a brand’s page, it’s up to me, the user, to continue following them or getting rid of them from my feed; it’s not up to you, Facebook. If my newsfeed is a mess, I can easily unlike everybody and everything and clear it up. But you shouldn’t get to determine whether I see posts from VISA or American Express; you don’t get to determine whether I think posts from Business Insider are of more value than posts from the New York Times. If I, the user (and also your most valuable product, by the way), choose to see all of the above—I should be able to see all of the above from the moment I opted to like their pages to the moment I unlike them.
Coming from the page manager perspective, we’ve spent hours upon hours, days upon days, years upon years procuring these fans. We’ve live-tweeted from events using hashtags and linking to our Facebook pages; we’ve included a Facebook logo on all of our digital assets; we’ve listed our Facebook page links on all of our ads; we’ve included the link on our business cards, email signatures and everything else to make sure our contacts,fans, customers and leads can all keep up with us on Facebook. Our call centers encourage customers to go and like our page!
After all that — you now take our fans and decide to hold them hostage from us? You’re essentially demanding “ransom” for us to be able to access the very people we, ourselves, brought to our page?
On what planet does that make sense?
If I want more fans on any of my pages, charging me to promote my page is completely reasonable. Charging more for a targeted audience is also understandable. Having a fee schedule determine what you’ll charge for what action — I totally understand. And if I want to promote a post by letting as many of my fans’ friends see the post — charge me then, too.
But seriously — on what basis are you charging me to show my posts to my own fans? (click to tweet)
So, they say a fan can always visit your page directly and access the posts. Do tell — how do you expect me to make them remember this page exists if they can’t see my posts? How many brands do you think I recall and miss on a daily basis? (Answer: NONE.)
So I’m told I can ask my fans to go to the page directly, hopefully find an option that requires the user to click “show in newsfeed” — and then, and only then, will they be able to see all of the page’s posts. That fan must then go to each individual page they like and do the same thing.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME, FACEBOOK?
That’s going to look classy on a website:
Like us on Facebook (and afterwards, go to Options to check “Show in Newsfeed” or you won’t see our posts…ever) for a chance to win a trip to Venice, Italy!
Seriously?
I am the first one to be support monetizing a service. Yes, charge me — I will opt to increase visibility by spending money and saving time. Charge me if I want to force my post onto strangers’ newsfeeds. I will pay more for quality likes. I will go even further to gain access to qualified leads. I am happy to pay per click, pay per impression or even pay per order when it benefits my company or client.
I’m not against paying. I’m not against you charging me, Facebook.
But I find it horrendous and so unethical for you to charge me to access a pages’ existing fan-base. They chose to follow us, and you make engagement with them impossible to do without the page paying per post.
It’s not okay from the page owner perspective, and it’s not okay from the regular user perspective.
This doesn't even come close to being acceptable, Facebook.
