Photo first appeared in Facebook’s Clever Plan to Charge You $7 to Promote Your Status Updates
Like most adults, I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I love seeing pictures and hearing about my friends’ lives. No matter how busy I am I can take a few seconds and peer into their universes and not feel so disconnected, or can I? I have very few friends. There I’ve said it. My Facebook friends are limited to people I really know. I share pictures of my family and talk about the events of my life – very exciting stuff. But because I have a very limited number of friends, I should be able to see everything they post on this online community. Not so. (According to Facebook, the average person sees only 16% of any individual’s posts.)
If you’ve been paying attention to your Facebook feed, you may have noticed around the beginning of October that you were seeing less and less of what was going on and much of the activity was being relegated to your right-hand side bar. Why would Facebook want to hide bury my updates? Monetization. If I have a very important update (aren’t they all?) and I want to make sure all of my disconnected network sees it, I can now pay to promote my news. To me, this is vaguely reminiscent of airlines instituting paid priority boarding. If everyone refused to pay, it would go away. (But we’re naturally competitive as a species and sitting in that seat first is imperative to our happiness.) Yet, when everyone pays to be first, no one is first.
Maybe I’m bitter or maybe I see this as a line of demarcation. Facebook has said they would never charge a membership fee but if they are charging me to post – or rather, to have posts my friends actually see — that’s the same thing.
What does this mean for your organization? It means very few of the people who follow you are seeing your posts — unless you pay. And if you expect people to return to your site after they “like” you, you’re not playing the odds (since less than 30% do).
Where does that leave us? Deactivating our Facebook pages or pulling out our wallets and realizing that there’s a cost associated even with free online community sites?
What do you think? Fair or sneaky?
Christina G. Smith is the Director, Content and Client Marketing at YourMembership.com and a believer in the effectiveness of motivating through game theory/gamification. She loves debates about the generational divide in the workplace and talking about the changing face of membership. She thinks Hemingway is the cat's pajamas.
I just noticed this today. I posted a meeting notice on my company’s FB page and got a notice to promote my event. I thought why not so I clicked then got the notice about payment info.
Thanks for the comment, Judy. Part of me finds these changes incredibly frustrating and the other part understands their desire for revenue. I’ve heard that they may provide “likers” with an option to choose and see all updates from certain businesses/organizations. I don’t have verification on this but if this were correct, it would be up to organizations to let others know about the option as the default would be their current algorithm.