Facebook Finds Yet Another Way to Screw Its Actual Customers

Yep, that’s right. Just when you thought Facebook couldn’t possibly find any other way to screw us over, Mark Zuckerberg proves us all wrong.

What Are The Proposed Changes

Facebook have announced today that they are having a trial run of a split newsfeed. One half will consist of posts from people on your friends list and adverts (of course) and the other half will consist of posts from pages you follow.

How will This Affect Your Page?

At a first glance, it appears your page is screwed. How many users will bother looking at the secondary feed? Probably not a whole lot.

BUT – is it really any different to the current system?

As it is, Facebook consistently refuse to show your post to people who like your page unless you’ve paid to boost the post. Organic reach is at an all time low.

The only real difference here is it’s now openly admitting that it will screw you unless you pay for your posts to be seen.

However, it will have a knock on effect. Currently, if you pay to boost a post, it will get a good reach. This then means that your next post (and the one after) will get a better reach, because the algorithm sees that your last post was popular so it shows your next one to more people.

That won’t happen anymore unless you pay for a boost for the next post too. And the one after. And so forth.

How will This Affect Your Business or Website?

Obviously that depends on how much you rely on your Facebook page to reach your customers/readers.

Personally, I don’t get a huge amount of traffic from my Facebook page. It’s more of a place for me to have a bit of fun with my readers.

If you rely on Facebook a lot for traffic or customers though, this will have a big effect on you. You will be looking at having to pay for every post.

I’m pretty sure I could find better marketing routes than Facebook for the same sort of price, and I’m sure everyone knows this too.

So Are Facebook Really Screwing Us or Are They Screwing Themselves?

Well that’s the big question isn’t it?

Surely they stand to lose a lot of revenue from smaller businesses and pages who maybe boost the odd post. Perhaps each small page spends an average of £100 a year. It doesn’t sound a lot, but consider the sheer amount of pages out there.

I would imagine most smaller pages now won’t bother to boost posts at all – what’s the point when it won’t really gain you anything?

With the current set-up, you already see some posts from pages you like on your newsfeed, so the ads don’t stand out as hugely obvious. with the new system, they’ll stand out like a sore thumb and users will just ignore them.

So Facebook stand to lose a LOT of money.

If I was more of a conspiracy theorist, I would say this is leading to one of two things:

• Either Facebook is beginning to run itself down and makes itself obsolete
• Or, more likely, it’s going to become a paid subscription network because they’ll have to make that money back somehow

Neither option sounds great does it?

Why I Think Facebook Will Become A Paid Subscription In The Near Future

If this so called test works in the way they want it to and it gets rolled out, I do believe Facebook will have to become a paid subscription service if they want to continue to make the profits they do now.

Why?

Well, as the title of this post says, the people running pages are the customers. Not the users with a personal profile.

Now I understand that user experience is important if you want to keep people on your network. But the whole reason for wanting to keep people on your network is to boast large figures to make money.

Now if Facebook do indeed screw their smaller customers and place paid ads in such a way that they get little interaction, it’s not going to be long before they stop making huge profits.

How else can they up their revenue? By selling a user experience.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments 🙂

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