This assembly of letters is about Facebook, which has very little to do with romance novels. In fact, my feelings about Facebook are kind of the opposite of a romance novel. My feelings about Facebook would probably be best summed up in a completely different book: Jodyne Speyer's Dump 'Em. (I did a book event years ago with Jodyne, and the two of us, with me talking about happy ever after and her talking about dumping people, made a very funny pair).
Anyway.
There have been a few rants and videos floating through my Twitter feed about how Facebook has changed this week… or yesterday… or in the last hour… or since I typed the word “hour.” Blanket statements up front: Facebook for me, both personally and professionally, is a free service. I am not charged to sign up, and I don't have a contract with them that enables me to demand anything. I can whine and gripe all I want but I have no expectations that Facebook would change or give a crap.
To misquote Kesha, I can indeed imagine the immensity of the fuck they're not giving.
So, Facebook.
There is a Smart Bitches Facebook page. I post links to what's here, talk to the people who have liked the page, and visit with them. Everyone who is connected to the SBTB Facebook page and interacts there is a lovely, most excellent person. And I know from my personal and professional FB usage, there are a good number of people who hang out on Facebook. That's their place, the location online that they most like to be. And even though it's different every time I go there – it's like a highway repeatedly under construction, and every time is a different route – I head over to Facbeook to say hi, talk about what's on the site right now, what silly things are going on, or maybe post a graphic or a copy of the workout. But I'm visiting folks. And despite all the stats about Facebook driving traffic, I don't expect any of the FB folks to immediately leave and go anywhere else. That's their hangout; that's where they like to be, so I go visit there. So I have no expectations that Facebook is going to grow me anything — neither social connections nor hydroponic tomatoes.
I used to advertise the SBTB page on Facebook. I set a budget of about $50 per quarter, and I'd run ads inviting people to join the discussion, recommend romances, or whatever else was going on at that moment. The cost per new “like” at that point was about $1.25 per, and after a few conversations with very cool people in publishing, I learned that, for a while, that was pretty much standard.
Then Facebook started changing. I have a presentation I give pretty regularly about social media and reader interaction, and every time I give it, I have to update every single slide about Facebook because it changes so regularly. Remember when there was the percentage of reach shown at the bottom of each post – and the math was really sketchy? The percentage of reach never made sense given the number of likes. Then the percentage disappeared. Then the organic reach and the paid reach appeared, and as always I was given the opportunity to pay Facebook to reach people who should have been seeing what I wrote. I was offered the chance to pay to reach people who already wanted to hear from me – because they'd liked the page.
Ok, Facebook. Whatever. I'm not required to spend money, so it's cool, but that's really not useful, is it?
Then I noticed that running an ad got me a pile of new likes on the page once the organic and paid reach statistics started showing up. And the return on investment for an ad was far, far better than $1.25 per like.
That made sense: if Facebook wanted me to pay to reach the people who already liked me, then they'd make it easy for my likes to increase, so I'd pay again to reach them on a post-by-post basis.
I'm also part of an entrepreneur's group online, and in one of our discussions, other business owners (all of whom are far, far outside the publishing realm) noticed similar results. Moreover, if they did elect to promote a post, the organic reach of their subsequent posts would drop dramatically after they'd paid to promote – the idea being, they suspected, that if you were willing to pay once, you'd be willing to pay again, especially if your organic unpaid reached was less after having paid to expose one post to a wider group. Sure enough, I did the same thing, and my results were the same. The paid-to-promote post went much, much farther than the ones I didn't pay to promote. The posts that came after the promoted one reached fewer people than the ones prior.
A few folks have tweeted this video about Facebook's advertising, and how the results are less than optimal and frankly useless. It's worth watching the whole thing – especially if you advertise on Facebook.
So whether you pay Facebook for advertisements and promotions or you pay a click farm, the results appear to be the same – and are equally useless in terms of extending one's social reach on Facebook. And to be clear, I don't really care what Facebook does. It's free for me, so long as I don't elect to pay for things. If they want to change it, it's their business, and their platform, and I'm electing to use it. I can choose not to use it, or not focus on it as much as other methods to connect with people. And I can use my personal Facebook feed or not – and really, at this point, my personal feed is like a celebrity gossip magazine replacing all the celebrities with people I went to high school and college with. Heh.
Then, on Thursday, Sam Biddle posted on Valleywag about more developments in the ever-changing Facebook in which we live in:
A source professionally familiar with Facebook's marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is “in the process of” slashing “organic page reach” down to 1 or 2 percent. This would affect “all brands”—meaning an advertising giant likeNike, which has spent a great deal of internet effort collecting over 16 million Facebook likes, would only be able to affect of around a 160,000 of them when it pushes out a post. Companies like Gawker, too, rely on gratis Facebook propagation for a huge amount of their audience. Companies on Facebook will have to pay or be pointless.
That 160,000 still sounds like a lot of people, sure. But how about my favorite restaurant here in New York, Pies 'n' Thighs, which has only 3,281 likes—most likely locals who actually care about updates from a nearby restaurant? They would reach only a few dozen customers. A smaller business might only reach one. This also assumes the people “reached” bother to even look at the post.
The alternative is of course to pay for more attention. If you want an audience beyond a measly one or two percent, you'll have to pay money—perhaps a lot of money, if you're a big business.
As Biddle clarified in the comments, Facebook's limitations of organic reach apply to what shows up in people's news feeds. If they go to your page, they see everything (obviously). But the organic reach limits the distribution of posts across news feeds, so people who only look at their own news feed would be less likely to see a post.
(NB: organic reach makes me think of organic vegetables trying to grab onto me with vines and stuff. I bet Bunnicula had organic reach.)
This is not surprising, but it's a bummer, as Biddle pointed out, for smaller businesses – and authors count as small businesses, too. For some authors who have built a sizable audience over the past few years on Facebook, and who interact multiple times a day with readers, the alleged suppression of organic reach could undermine the audience connection they've worked so hard to create.
That said, creating a community on Facebook means that Facebook stands between you and your community, and they can change the access any time they want. And of course the same is true of Twitter, and any other social network. (This is, by the way, why having a website and a mailing list are so essential – that's virtual real estate and communications access that's under the owner's control, with no social media located in between.)
Even if an author goes out of her way to interact with as many people as possible on Facebook, Facebook is in control of any and every page's reach, and there's little anyone can really do about that, especially if Facebook is intent on “throttling down” organic reach. Facebook controls Facebook.
It's not like social media platforms are immortal (though comparisons to vampires may be increasingly apt). I found my Friendster login a month or so ago – remember Friendster?
I don't think I've said anything earth shattering here, and it's not like I have exclusive access or news about Facebook. But I do know that many of you use it professionally, and I wanted to share what I'd learned from varying sources, especially because one of the things we all do here and elsewhere is connect with other people who love what we love. There are more options each day for readers who want to connect with books, other readers, and authors, and Facebook's decisions may mean that entrepreneurs and others will find other methods to connect. In my opinion, all of Facebook's decisions lately have made Facebook less useful for anyone who isn't looking to share pictures of their lunch, pictures of their kids, or pictures of their kids eating lunch.
But I'm curious how you see Facebook. If you're an author or business owner (same thing), do you use Facebook? Has the manner in which you've used Facebook changed recently? Have you noticed these changes, too?
If you're on Facebook as a reader, do you interact with authors there? What or how do you use Facebook? Have you noticed it changing?
Thanks Mia I found you! As for your q re: Google+ – I’m on google too but just use it for gmail – I recently got an invite to join a circle of friends for a blogger with google+ which I did, but she’s my only friend there 🙂 personally I’m not ready for another social media presence, I’m fine with twitter and FB
I’m active on Facebook, in no small part because a) a lot of my family members are there and it’s my main way of keeping in contact with them, and b) I’m active in the fandom for some kinds of music I like, also centered on Facebook.
But from my perspective as an author it’s been next to useless. I’ve got both a personal account and an author page, and I’ve paid for an ad exactly once—but other than getting me the number of likes I was expected to get for the amount I paid, it didn’t seem to do much or get me any extra sales. And I tend to get a lot more activity in response to things I post if I just put ‘em right on my personal account.
My wife Dara has had similar trials with her page for her music. It’s crazymaking.
As a long time FB user who mostly stays in touch with classmates and family I would otherwise never hear from, FB is recently less useful for me, too. I find that I have to go through my friend list occasionally and click on them to actually see their posts. Only the people I interact with regularly seem to show up. And the pages I’ve liked? Many of them seem to have disappeared, though when I click on them, they still seem to be posting. So, while I have no plans to abandon FB (I am also “stalking” my kids there – with their permission), I do not have huge expectations for them.
Also note: the Facebook pages I _really_ care about following (i.e., a short list of particular pages for various bands), I subscribe to ‘em in an RSS reader. This still works and is one of the reasons I’m clinging tenaciously to RSS even though many of the powers that be on the Internet appear to have decided RSS is dead. 😛
I’m a reader and have a personal account. I interact with a lot of authors there. And a few minor celebs whom I know for certain are the ones who interact with me. Plus friends. And then there’s the other stuff.
I got myself a facebook page when I fell out with the owner of a dog rescue forum that I helped to moderate. I would have lost a large number of friends I had made without the fb page, but I used my forum name (as here) rather than my real name as I have no wish to get in touch with long lost school friends or out of touch former workmates (yeah, maybe I am a touch anti-social). Although I do have some family as friends most are still those dog rescue people. I already used Adblocker so the ad’s have never been a problem for me. I am finding what fb shows and more importantly doesn’t show me in my feed increasingly frustrating as I just want to keep in touch with people I like, which is what they sell themselves as being about.
I have liked some author pages, though they don’t tend to use them for much self-promotion. I do have several friends who run businesses and have a fb presence, they all use asking those who do get to see posts to share them to extend their reach, which does seem to work for the kind of businesses they run – mostly small, often single person opertions, often making things to order. Many dog rescues also have fb pages as do dog lost sites and a lot of re-homing starts there – though obviously checks are done to ensure dogs and homes will suit – so it’s a shame that fb is becoming a less useful resource in this context.
Yes it is fb’s sandpit, but as someone whose main reason for using it is to keep in touch with people fb are screwing up their USP and the only reason me and my friends are still using it is there is no good alternative. Although there is some migration to Google+.
And Thank You Melissa for pointing out the ‘show pages’ button!
I’ve been following this closely for a few months now, and have been diversifying out from FB because I figured they would be dropping the reach even further. In fact, I just posted on my blog about it this weekend, including that video, which is a valuable if sobering tool. I used to advertise on FB but found the results relatively useless. I was paying to promote posts rather than to get likes, however.
I’m in the process of turning FB into an announcements only page, while beefing up my website more, and mirroring my blogs and announcements onto Twitter and doing more with an author newsletter. We worked really hard to build up my FB audience and it’s hard to let go of that 9K likes number, but since the insights show such dismal engagement and reach, it’s not like I’m really giving that up.
FB will continue for big corps who can afford massive advertising, and for people who want to connect with friends. My prediction? Authors, musicians, smaller artists? The pages are as useful as dust now.
Um…TUMBLR, not Twitter. I may post blog links on Twitter but mirroring the blog there? Noooooo…. *eye roll*
I also picked up G+…in case it ever makes it off the ground.
If you want to change your settings to ensure that you see all posts by your favorite author or fan page, you can change a setting in Facebook for each of these. This post shows the best description. I highly recommend that authors create a post similar to this to share with their users. The more people who change their settings, maybe Facebook will take the hint.
Hope this will help you guys.
http://iambaker.net/how-to-see-all-updates-in-facebook/
Melanie @ #49: Doublecheck that link’s instructions—I just tried it on a few of the pages I follow on Facebook and I’m not seeing the options the link describes. Facebook looks like it may have updated since that page went up. 🙁
(Shame, ‘cause it looked like it was a really helpful tip!)
I use FB. An avid reader, I follow many authors and blogs via FB. However, I don’t think that it’s the BIG marketing machine that some believe. Having a presence is important, but I think FB is more about brand recognition versus an actual sales generator (I have no statistics, this is pure observation on my part!). Sites/pages/individuals that focus on only using FB for a book release (as noted in a previous comment) are frustrating. The idea is that the author is accessible – even if it’s an illusion. Personal posts about life, sayings, pictures – all of those things are reminders of the author/page without pushing a book cover or sales link in my face.
It’s nice to have one place to get updates from a variety of sources, but FB is becoming less of a community and more of a business. I don’t like it, but I don’t like the alternatives. Twitter is okay. I use it, but it’s not the same. I can’t stand Google+.
@Anna the Piper
I have noticed it doesn’t work on all pages, but it has worked for many of the authors that I’m following. I guess I should have mentioned that, but I forgot. I’m not sure why it works for some and not others. I’ve tried to figure out why, but I haven’t seen a pattern yet.
I’m on the other side of the planet from my friends and family. I mostly use FB to keep in touch with them. I don’t play games, I don’t hunt down author pages, I don’t connect with anyone I don’t already personally know in Real Life.
I haven’t had much luck using it professionally. I find Twitter is good for little things, and blogs/websites (especially with RSS feeds) is good for relevant info-rich content. I love going through people’s archives, back a few years even, and getting info that has value to me. FB can’t do that.
I might create an author page for FB, as I do know other people who claim its value as a social media platform, but it’s not at the top of my marketing plan.
Melanie @ #52:
Facebook, not being consistent in the implementation of its UI?
I am SHOCKED. SHOCKED, I tell you!
Just for statistical purposes, I’m one of the people like LML and kkw who doesn’t use Facebook. At all. Or other social media. I don’t like the mass communication aspect. I’d rather email people personally, and I’d rather receive their emails. It’s been occasionally inconvenient, but more and more I find people saying something along the lines of “oh, don’t worry, our facebook group is basically moribund, I was just going to add you just in case.” For a while I felt bad not having a page. Now I just tell people I’m not on facebook and they deal with it.
As an author, I have a webpage with contact info. If people want to contact me about my books, they’re welcome to, and many have. (A couple have even become actual face-to-face real life friends because of letters we’ve exchanged, which I doubt would have happened had we been merely “facebook friends.” Many have also not, which is fine too.) At some point someone created a facebook page about me (based on a wikipedia page, which I also did not create). If that makes facebook users happy, that’s fine, but I’m not affiliated with it.
One clarification – I work for one of the smaller “massive corporations” that people mention might do well on Facebook. They don’t do well either. Doing anything with Facebook gets expensive fast – and keep in mind, they have to hire someone to come up with post ideas before it ever comes time to pay advertising dollars.
Even before the reach changes, most companies and executives viewed Facebook as a money black hole. It’s a thing you have to do because your competitors do it, even if you aren’t seeing return, like TV is at some levels/years.
I was frustrated enough about this to make a video about last week. It’s at the top of my page. But yes, I’ve seen huge changes.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7WIM-mTtrA7KUTjYWSqPwQ
For what it’s worth, romance authors: the April edition of Romance Writers Report is live on RWA.org and has an article with advice for boosting FB engagement without spending money.