Facebook Funny Business Part II

When I wrote my original post about Facebook advertising, I hadn't planned on another. However, with so much buzz about the drop in post reach, I just had to weigh in.  Since the change to Edgerank has occurred, the amount of people my page posts reach is only about 58% of the amount before the change. Thus, I decided to test out a promoted post again. This past week, I ran a promotion on a post from the week prior. That post had reached even less people than others as of late. 

I was very happy with the results. The paid reach was nine times that of the organic reach. We also got about 18 new page likes in that time, with only 10 showing as coming through the promotion. My concerns from last time were that many global fans didn’t seem connected to our brand. The two post shares seemed shady in that manner (no comment just a straight share to their timeline which had many other shared posts), but the new page likes were legitimate and tied back to employees at our global affiliates/business units.

 I didn’t run for the full ad spend, so it only cost $4.45. Unfortunately, that price is not what large brands will be able to get, as Mark Cuban shows.

FB is blowing it ? This is the first step.. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new Myspace as primary site twitter.com/mcuban/status/…
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 27, 2012

Sure he and many other marketers are upset, but as another blogger put it do we have much room to complain about the drop in reach when it is a free service. I tend to agree. Do people complain about LinkedIn’s premium membership pricing options? No, because those have been established from the beginning. Had a sophomore in his college dorm thought about how to monetize and build out advertising packages for a college who’s hot or not site, we may not have even had a reason to be upset.

Regardless of if we should be angry or not, a new workaround is being tested to allow page fans to get notifications/alerts whenever the page posts new content. Until it is officially announced as other updates to Facebook are to all users (do most even read those?), will you ASK your fans to do this to receive all of your page posts? Will the average Facebook users truly understand the necessity or think it is just another loop to jump through?