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Friday, April 18, 2014

The End Of Facebook – FB Caught Scamming Its Users

                              don't fer~geet 2 fill IN yer fb (dossier)  page         Oops :0         hey didn't the "intel" folks "invest"  in yer (dossier) fb  :O   lol "it's"  fer the kids ? 


by .                                                       
problemwithreachI write this as our FB page with 420,000 fans only has the ability to reach a few thousand people with every post; less than 1% of the fans we worked so hard to acquire.
When Facebook was first starting out years ago, it was a great tool for connecting people. Originally aimed at connecting students, Facebook was a means by which you could stay caught up with old friends and acquaintances. As it got bigger, more and more people were able to join Facebook, effectively creating a platform where people could instantly connect with one another and share information. Soon enough, communities popped up, people with like minds and interests were able to share new bits of information easily and even spread awareness about causes. Facebook became a huge tool in waking people up to various things going on across the world as people in one country could share what the media wouldn’t cover in another country. Users were able to help change the world through Facebook.
Then Facebook went public. The moment any company goes public something happens, money becomes more important than it ever was. Now Facebook had to answer to its shareholders and show revenue increases each year. They needed to constantly grow. The unsustainable model that has destroyed our world in such a big way now made its way into an online tool that was waking people up to everything wrong with the world and what followed is extremely unfortunate. Facebook began limiting what users were able to see as they wanted people to pay for their posts to reach people. Most of this was done to Facebook pages, but it affects everyone.
organic_reach
As the graph above illustrates, the more money Facebook wanted to make, the more they limited users ability to see what they liked on Facebook and the more Facebook page owners lost the ability to reach people. Cutting organic reach from 20% of your following to about 1% means that messages that matter can’t be shared through Facebook as easily. Not only that, users are constantly upset with the fact that Facebook keeps changing how their platform works and having the user experience worsen as each month goes by. Imagine signing up for a magazine that covered something you are interested in and you specifically ask to keep having it sent to you and then suddenly they only gave you access to things you don’t care about. This is the new Facebook.
If that wasn’t bad enough, as Facebook pushed out their new advertising models, they promised increased Likes, reach or engagement from users should you decide to pay for it. Personally we (CE) have tried this a number of times and the results are so shockingly poor you can’t even believe they offer it as a service. We’ve dumped hundreds into Facebook’s advertising models at various points only to reach another couple of people or gain a handful more likes to our page. How could such a model be sustainable? It’s not. but it gets worse, later we found out that Facebook actually sends ‘Likes’ to fan pages that aren’t even from real accounts. Imagine paying for a customer to engage with your content, but in reality that customer is a robot and never will. So yes, your fan numbers might go up but that account will never engage or view your content. Sounds like a bit of a scam to me. Paying for something and being told you are getting it but not.
Find out more about that below.

Facebook Fraud

Once we even made a meme about how Facebook was cutting organic reach and limiting what users could see. It was a very tasteful meme with no profanity, just information. When we tried to pay to boost this post, Facebook not only denied the advertising request but they deleted our post all together. How’s that for censorship? Facebook doesn’t even want users to know what they are doing to them.
So what can we do? How can we get back to sharing important information and messages with the world? Unfortunately I don’t have that answer. Currently we sit with 420,000 fans on Facebook yet most of our posts only reach about 2000 – 5000 of them. That’s less than 1%!
One option is to go to Facebook pages you like and where it says “Liked” click on it and select “Get Notifications.” This will ensure that posts from that page will have a higher chance of showing up in your news feed.
When you are on that page, do your best to share as much content as possible to increase the reach of that material.
Maybe it’s time we create another platform? Or in a mass way force Facebook to change it’s model? What do you think?
You can like us on Google+ or join our mailing list (see sidebar) to follow us more easily as well.
Want to see how backwards Facebook’s model is? Check this out.

The Problem With Facebook

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