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.
Hi Justin, good to catch up with you over the weekend.
As i mentioned to you i am in the same boat with my online business. I am at the mercy of eBay and their ever changing algorithms and practices in the way they run their “Best Match” search listing system. The importance of being at the top of the search list is so great on eBay it can mean going from $1000’s in sales to what i am experiencing right now, very little in sales (75% drop to be exact over the past 12 months)
This is why its never good to put all your eggs in one basket. I made a decision to start my own e-commerce website, which is doing well and picking up the slack. However having neglected eBay for a little while, i now have to go back and pick it up there again as well.
I always wonder to myself how long i can ride the e commerce train. I have to re develop my website every 2-3 years which costs alot of money. They who knows, some new medium will come out and then i will have to jump on that band wagon as well.
In short, business is always evolving. Facebook will not be around forever IMO, and you need to start setting yourself up now to protect your business and its following by churning them to other social media. You probably already know this and are doing it right now anyway. Your a pretty switched on dude, you’ve been online most of your life! Don’t stress about it too much and just keep pushing forward. End of the day, you love what you do, its a passion and you got to keep that fire burning :)
Bang on Mark! I’m all over it (can’t help myself haha!).
FB have dug their own grave long ago with this BS. I’m a firm believer in social means jack shit if the conversions to buying are low.
From such huge likes, how many are customer conversions?
Good points, I think it’s got a lot with them being driven by shareholders since they went public.
I remember having this discussion a while ago with a few mates and their own businesses from bloggers to other services. We pretty much agreed with your sentiments that it was risky, what they passed onto me was that overall reliance on a 3rd part like Google or FB can have it’s risks and what’s worse we can’t really insure stuff like SEO rankings or reach on FB.
It’s good that your producing good quality content that will still have organic reach and traffic to your sites.
Still gotta set up this meeting mate, but the rain is bad for detailing and it hasn’t stopped!
Facebook is imploding. I disabled my account again last week. Here’s a great video on the subject of Facebook promotion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag