This whole Facebook trying to get me to promote my posts to my existing likers of my Facebook page by shrinking the reach, continues to irk me. For a start, the ‘option’ of promoting your posts is only available to selected pages. That means that essentially, you pouring energy into your Facebook page and having a certain level of engagement makes you a target. They then throttle your audience so that you notice a change in the reach and then feel compelled to put your hand in your pocket.
It reminds me of the dial-up days where upgrades in speed came thick and fast with new packages becoming available. How do you get someone to upgrade if you’re a shady ISP? Throttle the speed so that you want the better service.
Facebook is under the misguided impression that my ego and my ‘marketing plan’ is so desperate to ‘get back’ the hidden audience, that I’ll spend money to access them. It’s a bit of an insult really.
But let’s imagine that I wanted to spend money on promoting a post…
When I take a closer look at the pricing and the so-called reach I would get, it’s an open and shut case of crazy-making. It just doesn’t make sense.
First up, they’ve added a little box that appears when you hover over the percentage of people reached, to remind you that they’re screwing you over:
“Dear Natalie, just so you know, this is a visual representation of how we have hidden your audience from you. If you would like to get some of these back for three days, at a price, please click promote.”
So I click promote and I’m ‘offered’ the opportunity to spend $15 to reach 3300, which is just under a 1000 more people than I’ve already reached, and then it goes up in incremental amounts until you get to $50 where I can reach 11,000. Woah! Hold up a frickin second? I don’t have 11K people on that page.
Interestingly, after $30 where you get 6,600 readers, you don’t have the option to reach the rest of the audience before the phantom additional people kick in.
This sh*te still just doesn’t make sense.
You see, there’s no point going for the first option, because it’s just another way of Facebook making you pay to reach something you’ve already reached or were going to reach anyway. On top of this, every single person I know that’s tried so far, says that it makes little to no difference spending the money, or certainly not enough to justify the spend.
Facebook isn’t guaranteeing that they can reach these people – they just claim that they’re putting you in front of some of the current unreachables. But who’s to say that you are? Isn’t it all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes?
And where are Facebook getting the extra people from? Woah! Is it possible that Facebook also want you to pay for the possibility that some of your likers might share your post? Are they going to run some ads to make your page show up elsewhere?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to say “You’ve reached 24% and if you pay $15, you’ll reach another 3300 people in your audience, which will be 60%”? Oh yes, that’s right – Facebook want part of the payment to cover people you’ve already reached. Er, OK then. I should point out, that I still wouldn’t spend the money, but at least I could wrap my head around that option.
There’s one thing that Facebook forgets here – they’ve long been squirrelling away our audiences.
They even do it on personal pages, hence why you don’t see updates from all of your friends. Basically, they’re always meddling. We’ve never been able to reach all of the audience because they hope by controlling supply, that you might shell out (ads) for more and more people, or work harder to add more people to increase your reach (and likes on individual posts), and then in turn they’ll jack some more of the audience from you, which means the cycle of chasing reach starts again. When we weren’t doing enough of that, they strangled the page audiences further so that some of us might finally cough up – welcome to ‘promote’.
I’m assuming that pay-per-click wasn’t an option because then the numbers really wouldn’t make sense….plus it would probably cost less and be under our control.
Facebook want us to spend money promoting posts but there is a lack of sense and transparency from them about how the hell they come up with these numbers in the first place. All of this crazy-making doesn’t encourage spend – it makes you reevaluate your options. In an era where there has been so much talk about how ‘measurable’ online is, it’s incredulous that Facebook have such a convoluted way of communicating what they claim is reach.
I’ve even noticed another bit of shadiness – On a post they say I’ve reached 32% of my audience which they claim is 5104. By my calculations, that would mean my audience is 15,950, which it isn’t. Facebook not only want me to pay to reach the people who already liked my page, but to also pay for the imaginary eyes that might see it on the off chance.
I also still don’t ‘get’ the concept – Why would I pay Facebook to reach an audience that already liked my page and essentially requested to hear from me, but that they’ve hidden a significant portion?
I find Facebook very tiresome.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
Book
