After testing promoted posts in the U.S. earlier this month, Facebook has now rolled out the feature for all users. Like the name suggests, users can now ‘promote’ their posts for a fee, allowing them to reach a larger-than-normal audience. These posts will feature prominently on newsfeeds, and will be indicated ‘sponsored’. Like Facebook’s normal advertising, you can set a limited budget for your campaign and track how many users you were able to reach.
Whether it was strategic or not, promoted posts are a solution to Facebook’s Edgerank, the algorithm that decides which posts are important enough to show up in your newsfeed. To put this into perspective, The New York Observer posted an article about the new system, claiming that, on fan pages, “messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans.”
It you look at Facebook’s ‘promote’ page, however, you won’t see Edgerank mentioned:
Although Facebook’s example shows a modest $10 being used for a post, the bloggers behind dangerousminds.net have crunched the numbers for their own fan page:
“To reach 100% of our 50k+ Facebook fans, they’d charge us $200 per post. That would cost us between $2000 and $3200 per day[.] We post seven days a week, that would be about $14,000 per week, $56,000 per month… a grand total of $672,000 for what we got for free before Facebook started turning the traffic spigot down.”
The blog reportedly paid $2000 to promote this specific post, titled “Facebook: I Want My Friends Back.” They took this as their chance to inform readers about their switch to more affordable promotional platforms like Twitter, Google+, and their email list.
While Dangerous Minds still has a decent Facebook fan base, very small businesses are even more out of luck. Besides the cost, promoted posts are only an option for Pages with more the 400 ‘likes’.
While Facebook’s new sponsored per-user reach seems to be much cheaper than Twitter’s, the main difference is that Twitter users are not at a disadvantage by not sponsoring posts. There is no filtering algorithm on Twitter, meaning followers still see every subscribed post in their feed.
A little over a year ago, Facebook posted on its own page saying it had “no plans to charge for Facebook. It’s free and always will be.” Despite this claim, promoted posts are not only intended for business use, but also personal. Recently, you might have noticed the following when posting on a friend’s wall:
Facebook is edging into ‘freemium’ territory by charging personal accounts to ensure friends see their posts. After all, isn’t the purpose of Facebook to help us stay connected? While you can still see all posts on friends’ walls, the effectiveness of the newsfeed is becoming questionable.
The act of ‘liking’ a page is no longer synonymous with subscribing to it. Unless businesses can afford to pay, we may see more and more users opt for alternative services like Twitter or RSS feeds.
However, it also seems unlikely that Facebook will change its mind on the new service. This week, Facebook “posted its biggest daily stock gain since its initial public offering in May.” The increase is linked to jumps in advertising revenue, specifically on mobile devices. The positive results will appease investors who were disappointed by Facebook’s “IPO disaster” earlier this year.
If you don’t agree with Facebook’s promoted posts, Dangerous Minds has created graphics for your Facebook profile and timeline photos. Download them here.
