[freehunter]

As someone who runs a business partly driven by people who use Facebook as a crappy replacement for RSS, I can confirm. Facebook made a change a while back where people who explicitly followed my page to keep up to date on local events and businesses suddenly were not seeing anything I posted. I had to start paying Facebook to keep them showing things to people, but even that is far slower than it had been. Out of about 2000 people following my page, I used to have around 1500 seeing my posts per week, now it's down to under 500.

My readers are pretty upset, complaining to me that I don't post enough anymore and they're missing events they wanted to know about, but I can't make Facebook show them what Facebook doesn't want to show them. I tell the people to go directly to my website, but for a lot of them Facebook is the only website that exists.

It's a small town without a newspaper or any other media outlets, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep on going because I think it's a worthwhile service. Facebook doesn't make it easy anymore though.

[thirdsun]

I understand that your audience is unlikely to setup an rss reader, but what about an old fashioned newsletter? Build a simple website (if you don't have one already) and let people subscribe to your events/announcements via email. Services like Mailchimp would come in handy to manage subscriptions, create newsletters and, of course, send them.

Also, explain the problem to your facebook users and encourage them to use the email subscription to not miss any future events.

[jasonkester]

Here's your experience summed up in comic form:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

Seems to be a common thing.

[freehunter]

Damn that's so true.

[dboreham]

This, essentially, is Facebook's business model.

[freehunter]

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... I pay to get access to my audience. I wish I only paid to get access to a new expanded audience, but I understand the reality of business.

My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see. Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.

[adventured]

I'm curious, what kind of ad rates are you seeing from Facebook to appeal to people locally in that small town? Do you consider it expensive? Does it seem artificially high (ie way out of line with what other local ad platforms might have been in the past such as a small town newspaper or radio station), or does Facebook seem to properly proportion the rates down based on the value of a small local economy etc etc?

I guess what I'm asking, is, does Facebook consider the value of you trying to reach those users, on a globally competitive basis (so you're competing with Nike for their attention), or is it cost effective on a more localized basis (you're competing with Sam's Plumbing on third street in the small town)? I haven't tried to reach users on Facebook in the style you're describing, so I'm not familiar with how costly it is comparatively.

[freehunter]

Facebook gives you the option of how much to pay and says how many people you may reach with that money. I currently pay $1 per day, which lets me reach about 800 out of my 2000 followers every week. Each post ends up being seen by 50-100 people unless someone interacts with it (such as a like, share, etc), then it can get up around 200-500 depending on the interaction.

I have no idea what a newspaper would charge for similar exposure, but I can tell you that at $1 per day, I'm often paying more money than I'm making from my site.

For comparison, six months ago I was reaching nearly 100% of my followers each week and each post would easily be seen by 500 people no matter what. It's been an absolutely catastrophic drop-off.

[DashRattlesnake]

> My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see.

They're the product, so it doesn't matter if they get what they want or not, so long as they come back.

> Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.

If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?

[freehunter]

>If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?

Well the way products usually work is the company says "pay me this amount and here is what you'll get". The way Facebook works is "Pay me... no, a bit more. Maybe a bit more. No, there's no guarantee of what you'll get in return. Don't like it? Pay a bit more then." The relationship between content creators and Facebook is a partnership. Facebook wouldn't be worth anything without users, and users would have a smaller audience without Facebook. The last thing you want is for that to tip too far in one direction.

Have you ever used Facebook ads? They're not exactly straightforward, and there's no "pay this amount to reach everyone who says they want to read your content". You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.

[DashRattlesnake]

> You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.

I'm not excusing it, I just want to put it in stark relief because I dislike it.

[dboreham]

>My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone.

That was exactly my point : Facebook's business model is to encourage businesses to accumulate followers and to then charge them for communicating with those followers.

[Trundle]

SMS marketing is an option if your userbase isn't in to using the internet enough for email notifications to be an alternative to facebook updates.

[freehunter]

I really do need to set up more mailing lists. I had it set up but I always got far greater reactions and click-through from Facebook so I haven't fully explored all my email options. Seems like it's time to jump back on that.