R.I.P. Today marks the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994). 20 years, that’s amazing right? I was the biggest Nirvana fan I know. I layered my clothes, I played left handed, I was in a 3 piece rock band… I screamed a lot, and even smashed my guitar up. I still play Bleach in the car. I miss you Kurt, always will.
11 Million reach/week.
Facebook have killed the reach on commercial pages, and are now forcing page owners to pay to get their posts out in front of their fans.
About a month ago the Zen Garage Facebook Page saw massive spikes in reach. We were reaching 10 million people a week (!), and our likes were going up 1000 a day. A lot of others were experiencing something similar. I even witnessed people who had no interest in Facebook at all, all of a sudden become Facebook addicts (who else doesn’t find getting a billion likes and shares on a post you make a lot of fun?).
Then, even quicker than the reach came, it died and we literally went from millions of reach a week back to 100,000 reach a week. This happened over a week. Our likes though, for reason started to ramp up and went from 1k a day to 2k a day then just a few days ago that too died in dramatic fashion. Someone at Facebook turned something off as we went from 2k likes in one day to no likes at all on one day, then 3 likes the next day and only around 80 likes a day right now.
To put things into perspective: Zen’s Facebook Page was getting 2k likes a day organically, and now it’s getting none, and if I pay Facebook for more likes it costs $50 a day for an estimated 200 likes a day. Get fucked.
I’ve been somewhat proud of the social media marketing skills I’ve developed over the past few years. Building communities is what I’m best at and Facebook has been one of the largest “new” tools I’ve invested a lot of time and work into, but I just can’t help but feel absolutely ripped off. This is phishing at it’s worst. I understand that Facebook has to make money, but it’s how they’ve gone about it that’s wrong.
Honest truth is I’ve been dreading the thought of looking back over the past few years of my life and realising that I spent all of it on Facebook. That’s been a very real fear of mine for the past couple of years, perhaps I should feel lucky I’ve only really lost 2 years to Facebook, and not a whole lot more.
I know what I have to do moving forward. It involves a whole lot of work fucking harder, just like I did in the old days. Am I bitter? A bit, but I’ve got no one to blame but myself really.