Facebook is going to make you pay to talk to your fans
For those of you in the Boot Camp this week, we talked about how many of the changes Facebook has made to its interface in the last 4 months have basically destroyed the influence of most brand pages.
For those of you who don’t know, it boils down to these two points:
- Most fan interaction with brand pages took place in the consumers’ news feeds
- When the changes were made, if consumers WERE NOT interacting with your content at all, your fans no longer saw your content appear in their news feed.
(Everyone’s view about 4 months ago was defaulted to “top stories.” “Top stories” are only those pieces of content where some kind of engagement has happened – i.e. likes, shares, comments. Go look at your Facebook page. At the top of your news feed, on the right, you see a “sort” button. If you leave the default – top stories – you’ll only see “interactive” content. If you select “recent stories” you’ll go back to seeing EVERYTHING your friends have posted. If you wonder why you never see certain friends posting anymore, that’s why. For brands, it means MOST of the content they post NEVER gets seen in the news feed.)
The question was: Why would Facebook do that???
The answer: Facebook doesn’t care about brands; it wants to get paid.
Today they announced the “promoted posts” feature. Looks like it’s going to run anywhere from $2 to $100 PER POST to be “guaranteed” to appear in your OWN fans’ news feeds. Story here – it ran on most of the major news networks yesterday.
Keep in mind if you have very savvy Facebook fans, this may not be an issue. However, for the bulk of Facebook users – they never know that they’re not seeing your content anyway.