Last August George Takei and Mark Cuban took target at Facebook over why some posts reach certain users and others do not. Facebook seems to be making it harder and harder to self-promote without the use of paid advertising. When a non-average user, such as George Takei wants to post something to his followers/friends, he will only reach a certain amount of users. Alienating thousands of others who might have been interested.
Mark Cuban has expressed further sentiment toward Facebook, noting that he would have to pay a few thousand dollars just to let half of the Mavericks fans see his message. We all saw the commotion when Facebook was thinking about going public. How would they compete? What do they sell? How will they make money? Then advertisements started appearing all over news feeds and now our feeds tend to be spilling over with advertisements. The algorithms that dictate what shows up and what doesn’t have become so enhanced that most people don’t get the organic posts from companies or pages because not enough people interact with the companies page on a habitual level.
Last August George Takei and Mark Cuban took target at Facebook over why some posts reach certain users and others do not. Facebook seems to be making it harder and harder to self-promote without the use of paid advertising. When a non-average user, such as George Takei wants to post something to his followers/friends, he will only reach a certain amount of users. Alienating thousands of others who might have been interested.
For the most part Mark Cuban is right, someone shouldn’t have to pay to reach their followers/friends. But a person shouldn’t have that many followers/friends, and unless their name is their business, reaching all of the followers wouldn’t be a problem. Problem is that for many celebrities their name is their business, and as the saying goes: “Money – without it you’d be losing my respect”.
For the most part it seems to be like throwing a message in bottle off an island. You write it and send it out there, not knowing who it will reach but knowing that it will reach someone. And if you really want to toe that message behind a plane over all the islands you’re going to have to pay.
So what would you do if say your boss, or client said that next month “We need to improve our performance on Facebook. What should we do?” What would you tell her?
First off, I would try to explain to her that there is no end all be all for social media. Just look through the past few blog post that I have done and you’ll see that there is a plethora of different touch points with consumers in the digital market place. Hell, I wrote an article detailing the death of Facebook (HERE). After I give her my spiel, and she still insists on using Facebook, I will detail how the use of ‘edge rank’ that had been used in the past has transformed into something much larger. First off those first three variable used (Affinity, Weight, Decay) have transformed into hundreds of different variable, each one exerting a different weight on what shows up. Facebook used to take just the past 50 interactions but now it takes the post types, relationships, click rate, share rate, etc.
The initial thing that we need to do is consistently post relevant sharable information with followers of the page. They need to include videos and pictures. A link will do, but text updates will be avoided. The focus of our page will be on quality because quality posts will result in more likes, more shares, and a higher rank on news feeds. Because of this we will also cut down on the amount of spam reports that the page gets, greatly improving our visibility of posts.
Slugworth's 