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"I want my friends back!"

payattention

Archived Member
Interesting read. I definitely agree with the sentiment that "putting a lot of energy into building a Facebook presence is a sucker’s game."

Great for Facebook, not so much for people who built up big pages or paid to attract people to their page to begin with.

53,000 is a more than respectable number of Facebook fans for a blog that’s only been around for a little over three years. So why is it that our pageviews—our actual inventory, what we sell to advertisers—coming from Facebook shares are off by half to two thirds when the number of new “likes” has risen so dramatically during this same time period?!?!

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friends_back
 

snoopy

Top Contributor
Interesting read. I definitely agree with the sentiment that "putting a lot of energy into building a Facebook presence is a sucker’s game."

Great for Facebook, not so much for people who built up big pages or paid to attract people to their page to begin with.

At the end of the day promoting a Facebook page is building up someone else's business. Facebook is in a major bind in my view, no clear business model & this idea is one of cannibalism.
 

eBranding.com.au

Top Contributor
I believe in building value in my brands, not Facebook's. That's why although some of my brands have Facebook pages, they're not the key focus by any stretch.

Personally I've found that 1 hour invested in Facebook pages is better spent as one hour on my websites, the return on my time has been consistently better.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not all businesses/brands will get value from extensive use of social media, for some industries and business models it's just not the best use of resources. For some of my sites I have basically zero social media presence because it's just not applicable.
 

TuffNut

Member
Hi

I think that if you can build a presence outside your own website is also important. If you had 1 million fans in a facebook page, dont you think that it would have been worth wile spending some time and money developing a network where you can promote the goods that you sell or raise your public profile?

I should do something with my fan pages :)
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.
So back to email marketing...?


...just read the rest of the article and I saw this...
With this very post—which will likely be the first and very last thing we’ll ever pay to promote on Facebook—we’re hoping to increase sign-ups to our daily newsletter (sign up at the top of this page), our Twitter feed and our Google+ page.

This was a good quote too:
If Google plays their cards right, they’ll be able to kick Facebook right in the teeth when they’re already reeling from a self-inflicted wound. An online advertising campaign touting how “Google+ will never charge you, that’s a promise” would be speaking directly to the Jonathans and Bills of the Internet. Google would simply be crazy not to try to capitalize on these head-scratching missteps every way they can. If anything can boost Google+, it’s Facebook’s management team. All Google has to do is sit back and wait.

I can sympathize with Facebook’s travails on the stock market and I can appreciate that they are providing a value—a great one, unprecedented, really—by connecting such a vast number of human beings in an electronic global village. But I can’t pay them $2000 a day and $672,000 a year for the exact same product that I was getting for free back in March!
 

DavidL

Top Contributor
At the end of the day, FB is trying to be commercial - make money as it's shareholders demand.

People are quick to complain (both businesses and users) but at the end of the day:

1) There's nothing saying it's got to be free
2) You don't have to use it

I've surprisingly actually found it quite effective to build eyeballs but then again I've only been using it for a few months.

Eg this post - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?...450708454942484.121270.450514851628511&type=1 I paid $10 to promote and it got 13,500 views, 235 likes, 23 comments and 23 shares. Seems like decent value to me?
 

Chris.C

Top Contributor
People are quick to complain (both businesses and users) but at the end of the day:

1) There's nothing saying it's got to be free
2) You don't have to use it
Yes, but there are also the following rules of capitalism to think about:

1) business will only be done if it is a good for both parties
2) when above market average profits are acheived new enterants will enter the market if the barriers to entry are lower than the returns expected

;)
 

DavidL

Top Contributor
What do you think the answers are in this case? I think:

1) Still makes sense for a business (in certain niches) to do business on FB. ROI beats many other multi-billion dollar media
2) FB is the market so hard to say whether its profits are above average. However they aren't great are they? And there are big, big barriers to entry...
 

FirstPageResults

Top Contributor
At the end of the day, FB is trying to be commercial - make money as it's shareholders demand.

People are quick to complain (both businesses and users) but at the end of the day:

1) There's nothing saying it's got to be free
2) You don't have to use it

I've surprisingly actually found it quite effective to build eyeballs but then again I've only been using it for a few months.

Eg this post - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?...450708454942484.121270.450514851628511&type=1 I paid $10 to promote and it got 13,500 views, 235 likes, 23 comments and 23 shares. Seems like decent value to me?

Seems like a great result, but the problem is you now have to pay again to promote content to these fans that you already paid to get.

Having said that, at the end of the day if (big if) it's effective then really there is nothing to complain about.
 

DavidL

Top Contributor
Seems like a great result, but the problem is you now have to pay again to promote content to these fans that you already paid to get.

Having said that, at the end of the day if (big if) it's effective then really there is nothing to complain about.

Yep you're quite right - you need to add both together.

And I'd be pissed like those guys in the article if I'd spent a fortune recruiting likes on the assumption it was a one-off expense.

Just checked that post and I got 43 new page likes from that post so the other way to look at it would be paying 23c a like but the post is free!

Note: that was one of the better posts.

PS at the risk of sounding like I'm 'bumming quarters' please 'Like' the page
 

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