Facebook just devalued "Facebook Pages"

[bill]

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-screws-social-media-marketers-2013-12 [businessinsider.com]

Facebook Slightly Tweaked How The Site Works — And It Screwed An Entire Profession

Facebook brand pages are suddenly getting a lot less traffic, and it's threatening the entire social media marketing industry.

...

So here's a hypothesis: Facebook's News Feed tweak wasn't only about getting "higher quality content" in the News feed. It was as much about reducing the reach of free ads on Facebook. Now, if a brand wants exposure on Facebook, it's going to have to buy it from Facebook.

[GoNC]

The reason that I find this to be offensive is because small businesses are the ones that drove people to Facebook in the first place (why, I don't know; it never really made sense to me). They spent untold millions to get people to like their business page so that they could stay in touch in a more social sense.

Now, those small businesses are totally screwed. They sent traffic to Facebook, possibly even paid to send traffic to Facebook, and get nothing in return. Worse, they don't even have a way to let their "fans" know that they no longer have a way to reach them, making these potential customers think that they've disappeared!

Like everyone else, though, my business page is now useless. Almost 3,000 fans, and my last post was shown a whopping 38 times. That's 1.2%, and not even worth the time it takes to log in.

[Tropical Island]

GoNC, I gree 100% with your comments.
FaceBook has screwed us.

Worse, they don't even have a way to let their "fans" know

You can pay to reach them.

[aegir]

I have no problem with paying for views, except Facebook doesn't allow me to promote the type of posts that are most popular with my audience. They think all graphics are ads, and text in graphics are just more annoying ads.

Facebook pulled back a promoted post of mine that was a collage of various objects, and the text in the graphic was credit and explanation. It was not anything that I'm selling, it was just something fun that relates to the field I'm in.

But consistently posting stuff that people are interested in, and like/share organically, has allowed me to get decent view numbers.