Facebook is furious

I'm not just angry, I'm furious. Back in 2006, when I first heard about Facebook in my alma mater, Indiana State University, I created my Facebook account and never looked back.

What I didn’t know exactly was what role this blue website would play in my future career. Over the past 10 years, I have become a professional consultant on media strategies in social networks.

Knowing and understanding how Facebook works — from the basic strategy of creating ads and content — has been and continues to be a huge part of my work. Over the years I have mastered the art of writing a letter, targeting ads, creating high-quality content, and many other things.
')
Working for several different employers, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of their budgets on this platform. I helped the pages to reach the coveted "million" subscribers much more than once, and spent countless hours - very early in the morning and very late at night - on creating eye-catching publications that were timely, fun, interesting, useful, relevant and just compelling reader to put "like".

A year and a half ago, I took up a new job from a major publisher - this is a well-known brand with a strong readability indicator. They were not particularly distracted by the promotion in social media and in 2015 they had “only” 167,000 Facebook fans, mostly coming from their main website.

And I was determined to change that! I took the promotion on the Facebook platform with pleasure, started advertising in games, developed a major advertising strategy, conducted A / B testing, hired successful authors of entertainment content, added new videos and persistently attracted new fans of the page, adding “like” buttons and social incentives for literally everything the company did.

Literally in a few days the traffic on our page increased significantly. Month after month, our friendship with this platform has grown, the page has been crammed with new fans, and our traffic on Facebook has increased significantly.

And then he got involved. Dumb algorithm. An algorithm that made every SMM specialist glow with a hatred comparable to the fire of a thousand suns.

Do not bother to ask Facebook employees about this - you will only get vague, meaningless answers, like: “This is your own fault. Your content sucks. ”

No, Facebook, I can assure you, the problem is not in our content. A few months ago, our Facebook traffic stabilized at fairly high values. And then bang - that's all. And now, the traffic is about the same as before my intervention. Seriously? How do you think we gained 800,000 page subscribers in a few months? What is this Universe, where such unreasonable popularity jumps are possible?

Yes, I understand, Facebook can do whatever they want. They can prioritize friends and family above publishers ’advertising posts if they want it. Good!

But publishers are investing unrealistically large sums of money in promoting their Facebook pages — to get people to love their page. They sincerely hope that this is their target audience - people who really want this kind of content. Does Facebook have any ethical obligations on its part to facilitate the delivery of this content?

The audience knows what they need, people know what they like and share it with pleasure, and Facebook has no “other” way to find out what people want more. We have about 1 million subscribers - 800 thousand of which are new, who voluntarily subscribed to the page for 15 months - and now Facebook thinks that these people sharply and less want to see our page after stable subscriptions all year?

This is simply wrong - and the reason is not that people stopped loving us or our content. Facebook is just doing a bad business. We pay them, but with the same success could burn money in a fire. And all this chaos suits, and publishers, like beggars, return again and again in the hope of scraps of traffic from the rich Facebook table.

As our posts see fewer and fewer readers, the vicious cycle continues. Fewer people see records, they exchange less, and Facebook thinks that they are simply not interesting to anyone. This is not true - and it is fundamentally wrong for Facebook, to “crush” our content in this way.

Then they tell us: VIDEO is the new king of the content party, and repeats like a parrot: "video video video". However, they do not allow advertisements in the form of pre-rolls or banner ads over the video. Simply put, this is not YouTube, so you just cannot make as much money on Facebook. Facebook's ambitions are clear - they want to dominate the world. They want to become like Google and replace the Internet. Someone stop these insane habits of Facebook, reminiscent of the ambitions of North Korean dictators!

We still get most of our traffic directly. We have very loyal readers, so that there, most of the sites are ready to give everything for such a high-quality audience. Direct traffic is much better than traffic from social networks. It does not depend on the decisions of the "dictators of the platform." But my job is to make the social network work for us for the good - but it seems that Facebook did everything possible to prevent this from happening.

As a person who spends a significant part of his life thinking about Facebook, developing a strategy for the platform and spending thousands of dollars on promotion ... I feel like I have been rudely used.

Facebook should reconsider their narrow-minded position. Million people have expressed interest in viewing our content on Facebook. And I believe that they should be able to see it.