Facebook Wants You To Pay To Talk To Your Fans

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One of my favorite blogs, Dangerous Minds details what many have long suspected – Facebook now wants you to promote your posts in order  for the people who liked your page to see it. If you felt like the majority of your fans have been seeing less and less of your posts and your reach has went down recently, you’re right. Only 15% are seeing it because Facebook is hiding it from them, unless you pay them a bribe.  Learn more about this awful, awful abuse of trust that Facebook is committing here. From the article:

“It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

In other words, through “Sponsored Stories,” brands, agencies and artists are now charged to reach their own fans—the whole reason for having a page—because those pages have suddenly stopped working.

This is a clear conflict of interest. The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meantraking in nearly $1M a day.”

 

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Jesse Cannon is the editor of Musformation. He produces records at his studio Cannon Found Soundation. Follow him on Twitter at @JesseCannonMusF. For more info please visit his website.

  • http://www.atlumschema.com Andy Mort

    I have experienced a massive drop in interactions. This sort of thing always signals the beginning of the end – short term profits, long term decline. We shall see.

  • Stickman

    You are utterly wrong about this being a conflict of interest. If you really think that, then you don’t know Facebook’s business model at all.

    Users are not Facebook’s customers. They are not. The typical user is part of the product that FB sells to its customers. Those customers are businesses and individuals who want to reach the users of FB, with some message.

    You, as a user, are the product.

    You are sold, as a user, to the customer.

    When you understand this, then it makes perfect sense. FB is about collecting enough information about users, so that they can provide their customers with the ability to more precisely target their promotional messages to users that are more likely to be interested. Every post, every like, every picture (each of which is analyzed for content), every comment on a post, every interest indicated by what you click on (on FB and on any site partnering with FB, which means sites with FB links – tons of them). All of this is tracked, analyzed, summarized and sold.

  • Shitbrix

    And this is why we use soundcloud.

  • http://www.facebook.com/makush86 Michael Kushner

    Corporate greed sucks. :(

  • David

    What makes you guys think you have the god-given right to advertise on this, or any platform, any way you like? You use FB because you need their userbase. They even host your page for you. And you act like a bunch of whiny petulant children when they restrict the rules on you guys to cut down on spam. What makes you think they are going to cater to advertisers like you? Get real. You want freedom? Host your own website, license some mailing list software and start collecting emails. Good luck to you.

    • http://www.facebook.com/steven.a.poe Steven Livication

      It’s SPAM to provide my customers and fans with updates? People who made the decision to subscribe to my updates because they wanted to hear them?

  • http://twitter.com/TheModernMuso ModernMuso

    This is annoying from two ends:

    As someone trying to connect with fans, now my updates and activities are being seen by less of the people who wanted to see it.

    And as someone who wants to follow pages, I’ve “liked” pages because I want to hear news from them in my news feed, now I’m left out of the loop!

  • http://twitter.com/5smoothstones Five Smooth Stones

    15% of my band’s fans will see our first post that we’re moving back to MySpace. It will take a few cycles but most will eventually see it and come along. Sure it’s a business that needs revenue, but they have baited us with one plan and are shafting us to another, so to speak…