Yesterday I was amused by a post about how Facebook was testing paid post promotion in New Zealand.
I thought it was a bit crazy, but dismissed it as not all that important. After all, the company was just testing paid post promotion, and I bet Facebook tests all sorts of things that never see the light of day outside the test market.
But I was wrong to dismiss Facebook’s paid post promotion. Today, as I was posting to the AboutUs Facebook page, I was introduced to the new “Promote” option that’s now been rolled out worldwide.
Here’s what Facebook says about this new feature:
Promoted posts are a simple way to reach more of the people who like your Page and their friends.
Your promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your Page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post.
This raises all sorts of questions for me:
- How many people would be willing to pay? I’ll admit, I’m tempted.
- How will people react to seeing promoted posts labeled “Sponsored” (albeit with subtle gray text) in their News Feed? Twitter’s equivalent “Promote Tweets” don’t have too many fans, as far as I can tell.
- Would Facebook have gone the promoted posts route if they hadn’t been planning their IPO?
- Did Facebook create their EdgeRank algorithm just so they could later charge people to get more reach and circumvent that very algorithm?
EdgeRank is Facebook’s magic-black-box algorithm that allows you to see only a small fraction of the total posts created by your friends and the pages you “like” in your News Feed. The goal of EdgeRank is to show in your News Feed only the posts it thinks would be most interesting to you. There are many factors that make posts more likely to show up in your News Feed, including the level of engagement – likes and comments – that posts have earned.
Facebook has said that the average post from a person reaches 12% of that person’s friends. On company pages, Facebook shows admins how many people each post reached (see image at right).
The EdgeRank algorithm, and how it filters posts, makes Facebook different from other social networks. Twitter and Google+ – two of the largest social networks - show posts from all people and companies you’ve chosen to follow. Its EdgeRank algorithm puts Facebook in a unique position to satisfy and get more engagement from users than other networks – and now it’s clear that Facebook has also discovered the frustration created by EdgeRank can drive companies to pay for preferential placement in their fans’ News Feeds.
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Google is the largest company using algorithms to serve up content that will best satisfy their users’ requests. Is paying Facebook to promote a post akin to paying Google to rank you higher in search results? Or is it like paying Google to display your ad next to search results? Perhaps Facebook post promotion is more like paying Gmail (or another email provider) to make sure your marketing emails land in your prospects’ Inboxes, and not their spam folders.
What do you think? Will you pay to promote your company’s posts? Will you unlike pages that pay to show up in your News Feed? Answer by posting a comment below!
For more info from the horse’s mouth, check out Facebook’s help page Promote Your Page Posts.
This article was written by Kristina Weis of AboutUs.
Kristina is customer service and social media lead for AboutUs. She helps website owners who are trying to promote their businesses online. Her personal blog is at KristinaWeis.com and she tweets at @KristinaWeis.
No. Fb is just for fun and personal interests to me. If Fb is going to charge for perks, I am out.
I’m more concerned I’ll now be subtly penalized for not paying to promote posts.
Nothing subtle about being penalized for not paying. The number of posts seen will be about the same. Your nonpaid posts will be seen by no one as the people who do pay get all the eyeballs. I want there to be an option for each fan page I like to have it show me ONLY nonpaid posts. Otherwise I’m gonna start deliking pages big time.
Nahhh… if I wanted to pay extortion money to the Russian Mob, I’d just drive down to Brighton Beach and do it in person. At least I could swing by Sheepshead Bay and grab a good seafood dinner while I was in Brooklyn.
I would like to know how many people would click a sponsored link. I know I wouldn’t click – our PCs are set to block most of the ad servers – including google’s.
What do others think about it?
That was fast! Having made more than 100 billion dollars on stocks, facebooks goes “business” almost immediately. someone might even say that Zuck has sold his soul for money.
In my opinion, facebook has to make money for it’s stock holders, and this sure is a tried and proven way. Google is doing double digit billion dollar ad revenue each and every quarter, so why not facebook?
I’m sure we will se many more of these revenue streams popping up on the largest social network in the world.
Good article :-)
The irony is that the paid posts will be the ones people do NOT want to see.
Having said that, I wish Twitter had an EdgeRank algoroithm….
tj
I would not pay to promote my personal facebook, but as a business I might pay a little here and there to promote my company posts.
I am absolutely agreed with you and I am tempted to try. Yesterday I had a dinner with my friend who owned online business and he tried to market his side by placing add on Face Book. I was surprised with his result. In short time his business page got over 200 likes and his add created $800.00 in sales that is very important for new online business. I am tempted to try with a small daily investment and start with a budget of $10.00 a day.
Nice post Kristina. I like your analysis. Good food for thought.
First you make an algorithm and than charge money to promote your content…
However, like you, I am also tempted to try it to see how it works.
Nope, not going to pay to promote my posts, and no, I didn’t buy into the IPO hype.
I’d rather pay-per-click to Google knowing I have a ready-buyer with a keyword search, than pay FB for sticking unwanted ads in people’s faces.
Will I pay to promote your company’s posts? Maybe, am tempted as well.
Will you unlike pages that pay to show up in your News Feed? Only if they start spamming, somehow, especially companies with large advertising budgets.
Yes, I would definitely pay to get posts to more people.
The paid for posts will definitely get annoying in my news feed, i will be unliking any that start to constantly show up! I wont be paying to promote my posts either, but like a few others have mentioned, it’s a worry that we will be penalised for it.
While I have several facebook (business/fan pages), I believe that there are a huge number of people who click their LIKE buttons because they are personal friends, or just showing support for a specific post.
If they are TRUE fans, they will be visiting often enough to have my new posts show up in their feed…
but if they were just being a friend, or one time commenter, I do not believe they should Have To read my posts.
Ooops, forgot, loved the article. Thanks for your insights.
Organic internet is best – being pushed down the road of paying (just a little bit here and a little bit there) is not on. AboutUs could save us all by setting up a like each other on Face Book – I’d be happy to like all (reasonable) websites that like mine.
No, kalmstrom.com will not pay for likes. We reach more people through our blog anyway.
Being a businessman, i would love to test it…. if its worthy for promotion of my business and if i get return also, i would love to pay…..
It looks like Facebook has put the cart before the horse by getting eyeballs first without even considering how to monetize it. And now they are desperate at trying to make a living out of it. It is a very bad business practice IMHO.
People might be turned off by this new marketing gimmick and eventually I think Facebook would stabilize with much less people on it. Remember MySpace? That’s where facebook is headed.
Are you kidding me? Have you seen the way Facebook has been promoting gambling with their so called “Game Apps”? Yeah, sure you get about 15 minutes of free gaming or Facebook credits…Then they’re oh so willing to accept your credit card to”buy more credits” at a “preferred customer discount” … Mugsie Malone at least didn’t pretend he was smiling and your ‘buddy’ when he stole your family fortune and stabbed you in the back! I’ll be damned if they EVER get one red cent out of me!
‘Invite all your friends ’cause misery loves company’…WHAT A CROCK!!!
Just in the past 6 months I’ve seen Facebook do a complete turn around and I’m sorry, the Gambling Games are only one example! Social networking was supposed to put an end to ‘rigged , blown out of proportion page ranking and internet robbery but now in the ‘name of the stockholders’ they must be using corporate think tanks to come up with ways and intricate schemes to socially rob us and still LOOK AS FRIENDLY AS PEANUT BUTTER & JELLY!
And NOW we’re supposed to pay them ‘bribe money’ just to get above the 15% of our posts that SHOULD have been at 100% exposure to begin with? Why do you think they split our posts between our personal page, our Facebook business page and our general friends news page in the first place? Too much information? No, Too much social exposure! And have you compared the advertising prices compared to Google or Bing, etc.? If you say $100 their reps actually balk and suggest you come back after you’ve robbed a bank!
So $10 is not the beginning or the end I’m afraid…They are ruining the whole concept of “Social Sites and networking for a better, safer internet for our children’s children” and I believe they will successfully destroy the public’s trust in the internet that some of us were just seeing a glimmer of hope of restoring!
This is a travesty of reality by trying to manipulate statistics with incentives. Whoever pays gets better statistics, but are they true or just a twisted way of doing things? Ads and promotions should always be clearly posted as such, and whoever wants to pay for them may freely do so as far as it is clearly shown as an advertisement and/or a promotional device. As for Facebook “promoted posts” I am clearly against such new feature. I certaily hope that the paid posts will be the ones people do NOT want to see.
Facebook is going to kill itself in my opinion. So, you are telling me that after spending years building up a huge group of friends, that they do not even see the posts I write? That is insane. What is the point? Half of the people I know are angry with Facebook in one way or another right now.
Facebook was known as the number one social network. Free, for friends to share things with each other. I will not pay for this. Who can afford to pay to post what they are doing with their friends? That is why Facebook grew so large in the first place. It was a social network.
Now it is a financial network. It will die off slowly.
As a business owner, I have wasted hours of my time building up a network of followers to share my work. Now that is gone.
As a person, keeping in contact with old friends, that is gone too.
Sad.
Well, I remember when Myspace was the big one and Facebook passed them. There will be another. Let’s hope they learn from this.
Definitely won’t be sending any promoted posts to my fan page users. Not interested in trying to supplant the failed stock bid with my paltry earnings.
In my opinion they lost alot of money with the stock and the fail of advertising campain where they are based…. Why ppl wanna pay for have sponsored post…. This is not for a company coz they use advertising it’s only an uselessness thing for user!
Nicolò
on a unrelated note, Zuckerberg refinanced his $5M mansion last week with a 1.5% ARM – He’s got the money, so why???
That is funny. Maybe there’s some tax incentive?
I just read about that tonight too! I can’t imagine why M.Z. would re-finance his home. I am surprised that he is paying off a mortgage at all.
Kristina: You have a good point, about the tax advantage from deducting mortgage interest. But it *still* seems odd for someone with that sort of wealth to be fussing over the minimal benefit from deducting approx 1.5% interest… (although a $5 million home is modest for billionaire homes, and for Palo Alto real-estate).
Let’s not confuse, “promoted posts” with “promoted ads”…these are two completely separate things. Ads are classified on the right under the “Sponsored” section…posts that have been promoted are not distinguished from any other posts you will not know if someone has paid or not for the post to appear in the timeline feed, since the timeline change many business pages have lost their ranking on their fans pages, the “promoted” post allows the selected post to be seen by more of their fans than what had previously been allowed by the algorithms Facebook uses to display posts on a fans post feed. Like it or hate it, it’s another option for those who wish to use it, and can be completely ignored for those who have no desire.
Easy enough to promote through fan pages and get a broader audience at no cost.
Absolutely not. Most of my friends have started HATING the web site for it’s practices. I will most likely UNLIKE a page that starts sending advertisement in my direction. In fact I’ve already done that to some pages.
I think Facebook will slowly destroy itself.
I think that facebooks paid post option is worth looking into and keeping an eye on for now. I doubt that I would spend any money on it until I start hearing more about user experiences from some of the individuals in my online network and from some of the websites that I visit.
If I hear of a decent amount of good experiences with this it might be worth testing the waters and going from there.
All in all I think that FB has the right to do this and it is more akin to googles sponsored results.
-Tony
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I have personally learned to go with the flow when joining other people’s social networks. I obviously don’t get a say or vote. If Facebook really cared about the fan/business page owners, then they would have left the feature intact that they had a couple of years ago where fans could invite their friends to ‘Like’ fan pages & not the way that got it now, where only the admins can invite their friends. Now, if they would bring that feature back, then our pages could get viral ‘Likes’ like they used to without admins needing to place ads to promote their fan pages.
Another awesome and informative post from AboutUs, thanks Kristina.
I’m not sure whether we’ll pay to promote our company posts or not.. I’m interested in seeing what other companies do with this new feature though.
-Peter
I am ticked at facebook. Facebook was suppose to be for fun. Now all the search engines are forceing us to do “SOCIAL MEDIA” to get ranked so it has turned facebook into one big commercial. The banned me from facebook last week because I invited a few young mothers who I saw on there with small kids the ages for children’s boutique clothing that I sell, to be my friends. I got a message that said I should only invite people that were family or I went to school with.???What’s up with that. No I would not pay. I ran ppc on facebook for 3 days and got no sales from it or responces. I won’t do that again either.
I am afraid I would not trust FaceBook with much of anything let alone pay them, you never know where messages are coming from, did someone share it or is FB just sending a message because they can, most people do not realise that FB sends messages weather you want to or not, even with this section turned off in the controls, they still seem to be able to send messages on your behalf, dishonesty is dishonesty, no matter how you sugar coat it, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the fun has gone out of it, as it is just another business now, one that collects all your private data
What a scam. Anyone who bought that IPO stock was a fool from the beginning. Didnt they learn from the last gigantic stock market scam fueled by the electronics industry? Only TWO days after they sold stock, I was hit by telemarketers who said they were allowing only a limited number of business owners per any given area and I should sign up to be in the stable for my area. I almost threw up from laughing.
Will this make stockowners a fortune??? Will the advertising bucks come rolling in? Yeah sure!! I have a couple crates of LUCENT to sell you along with swamp land.
I looked at this and wasn’t sure what to make of it. What’s the point of building up likes. So now I have to gain friends and followers, and work to do that, as well as now I would have to pay to reach those same people that I worked to get to follow me. Not happy with it, but would like to see what the results show. If it increases sales than it’s all good, but honestly if it’s like most of their other ad advertising, I’m sure it will be a flop. Barely got any sales performance out of the ads. I don’t agree that I should have to pay to reach the people who have liked my business page. What’s the point then? I’m doing all the work to get the people, and now I would have to pay just to keep in touch with them?!! I think not. Right now it’s an evil necessity, but I would say that I’m not happy with the way it’s moving.
In many respects this is a blatant rip-off! So not only are they practically forcing us to pay to have our posts seen by our own hard-earned fans, followers, and clients but just recently they have also implemented another scheme….the so-called “optimized CPM” Yes, now they have added insult to injury!
No way! I have just paused my ads and may soon be deleting them all together! I only started using FB ads about a week ago! Incredible! Yesterday they took away the option for bidding on CPMs and replaced it with this insulting “optimized” CPM! Yeah….”optimized” for who? For them, of course, to force advertisers to pay more without giving us a choice!
In fact, in the space of just one day the cost of my CPMs was increased …or as they so insultingly say…..”optimized”….. to ten times the amount that I was previously paying! Of course, for now I have “paused” my ads! But you know what?….that “delete” button is starting to look awfully good!
Come on…..FB…. we all know that advertising is your “golden goose”! Be intelligent…..be smart ….and don’t kill it! ….and Facebook along with it!
It’s extortion, pure and simple. Think about all the companies that have been striving for years to build a strong presence on Facebook, websites that have been linking to their Facebook pages for ages, and small businesses who were told it’s finally a level playing field for everyone because good customer support and not big bucks will win you friends and followers on Facebook – they’re all being told now, that they can’t actually communicate with their followers unless they pay a fee. This is extortion and fraud. Facebook is just as much in the business of hoodwinking folk as a petty con artist.
It’s real easy to unlike Facebook…..it’s already lost it’s appeal with the timeline and now more reasons. They are taking a company that had a huge appeal and turning it into a business with business models. They’ve forgotten their who their core is.
As a marketer I’m intrigued by the opportunity to have my stuff in front of more eyes. At the same time, unless FB finds a way to keep this very limited (thus making it more costly to use), I think the backlash from users will make it ineffective at best.
Purely as a user, I want complete control over my news stream. I won’t Like it. Literally.
No I don’t think I will be giving FB any money, people usually go on to catch up with friends not to see advertising. If they wanted advertising they could watch TV (and it dosen’t have to be free to air either)
I, for one, am getting very tired of Facebook – always throwing some kind of ‘ads’ at me. They are forever putting ‘pages’ into my newsfeed – ones that I have not subscribed to, such as Gifts, Gifts for Friends, Teddy Bears, etc. etc..
This is just one more way to obtain money from people – business, pure and simple. I’m almost at the point where I’m out of there.
This might just be the one last straw that pushes me over the edge…
Great e-mail. Your email blasts are the only “spam” I receive that I actually read and do not consider “spam”. I like the thought experiment. I think it’s parallel to Google devaluing do-it-yourself “spam” backlinks and “over-optimization” as a means of encouraging the purchase of ad-words.
Also, if “social signals” are the new backlink, and paid banklinks are bad, and Facebook is selling social signals, that aren’t paid social signals the same as paid backlinks?
Finally, the hype has finally been dissipated by the recent Facebook Flop. A certain percentage of the online population (read market) is never going to spend time on Facebook and the price of it’s stock reflect’s that reality. Google’s recent push to Google+, deprecation of Google Local, partnership with Zagat all indicate movement toward centralization and standardization, which creates a new set of variables to be gamed.
I’m trying to figure out how to get a reviews of laser toenail fungus treatment on a site created for reviewing restaurants. Maybe we could serve little cupcakes created fresh from our Laser-Bake Oven?
As we all now like to unlike Facebook ( same was with Google not so far ago ), We all use it, post on it and looking to know more from its advertising opportunities.
And saying nothing about the stocks………
Oron
Well I think Facebook should remove this feature but they need to make money.
As a user a wouldn’t like it but as a business I love it, so.
I first responded with:
“After my experience with Facebook’s paid promotions, I’ll drop out of Facebook before I let them TAKE another penny of mine! Their promotions are not as good as they claim them to be and they have made, what I consider, major errors and overcharges concerning advertisement accounts – and they refuse to reconcile their errors. ‘Shame on you for fooling me once, shame on me if I’m fooled twice!’”
So I was asked to tell about my experience with Facebook’s advertisement. Well, here it is:
It started when I logged into Facebook and viewed a Facebook ad inviting me to advertize on Facebook using an ad I create and they post for me. The deal I selected was a small ad that was supposed to run for four days over one weekend. It was to start on Friday and run through Monday. The cost was to be $5.00 with a $5.00 per day limit on “clicks.” With my low-budget, my idea was this might be just the thing to start with and try it out. If it worked well, I would try it again with the idea of increasing the number of “clicks” and see if I could actually sell something. However, as it turned out, Facebook (somehow) increased the amount of time they ran the ad from four days over one weekend to one month with a max amount of dollars and max number of clicks – totally unauthorized. That was one problem. (Fortunately, for me, I caught the error (which they deny existed) and cancelled the rest of the ad.) The next problem we had was, even though there was a small amount of results, no one I knew ever saw the ad – even though many of them are on Facebook a lot. The final result was, I received a few “Likes” from people I don’t know and have never heard from since. So who are these people that clicked on my ad? Are they real or are they just made-up people that Facebook used to make me think my ad was successful? Who knows?
Great post. Well maybe Mark’s new wife has her eye on something really expensive. Not that they do not have enough to “get by on”. lol
I do not know exactly what are you talking about. I have had no time to explore Facebook or Tweeter. If you sell something and that Web sites help you sell and you get a well deserved profit, that’s OK. Also if that Web sites help you get in touch with people you like, that is OK. Also the profit of those sites should be very clean. I think Internet should become cheaper and cheaper. Operating systems and sophisticated Web sites contain techniques developed by so many people that is difficult to say who owns that codes. It is (more and more) public domain property in a worldwide scale. So we should keep ourselves on our tiptoes and keep Internet free and steer things into the right direction. It is our duty.
i have more then 5 million user in my 10 Facebook Page fans and i will never pay to promote my content ! because Facebook said “Sign Up It’s free and always will be.”
Thank you for sharing. was useful for me
Paying Facebook to show my posts to my friends? Is this what it’s come down to? Well, I’ll have to wait to see some numbers from other people willing to pay for this type of Post Promotion service (advertisement). If it truly shows to be cost effective, I may give it a try. But it’s hard to throw money at what should be a free social network, that so far hasn’t been much more than pointless banter and photo sharing of friends and family. Definitely not going to make me a millionaire, so I can hold off on paying for Facebook.
After being totally disappointed in Facebook’s new algorithm that significantly decreased my reach to fans, I finally broke down and broke down and paid for a sponsored post on our Facebook FanPage. Both of my paid promotions resulted in a significant increase in the reach, one post in particular was geared towards our company seeking contributing writers, and I received a few interested responses as well.
The other post reached 31% probably triple the normal reach. The part that is quite disturbing is that our reach was already quite decent prior to Facebook implementing this new feature. At least 1/3 of the traffic to our site was from our Facebook Fanpage. We have over 13,000 fans.
The problem is that Facebook is too big to give you any customer service, there have been many days where our posts simply did not show, or we couldn’t post at all. They took away the link field on our page which creates a funky look to the post as well. Anyway that’s just my two cents. Bottom line is that we will from time to time pay to promote a post but it won’t be on a regular basis because it’s not finally feasible for our small company. We will look to other avenues to replace the traffic.
The new Google Penguin update should benefit the white hat seo for social community facebook as the algorith rewards those who practice ethical link
building at the expense of those who are intent on gaming the system.
After all, search engines are always trying to stay ahead of the
game by delivering the most relevant results.
Fantastic article!!!
I would definitely pay to get posts to more people
Fantastic article!!!
I would definitely pay to get posts to more people
Great post. Well maybe Mark’s new wife has her eye on something really expensive.
Facebook is trying many things to make money.I think Zuck is getting a lot of pressure from the investors.Facebook should just diversify into other areas like creating a Facebook Search where it wont be controversial to put paid Ads.Google started as a Search Engine and now they are everywhere,from Email to Social Networking.If Google can create a Social Network why cant Facebook create a Search Engine? Food for thought.
Kristina,
I’m referencing your article in mine.
Although the amount paid is supposed to be directly proportional to the number of people who see the posts, this is not what we see. For example, we promoted some articles for $5, receiving 5000+ “seen bys,” but only ~14 link clicks. With others post, we promoted for $10, receiving 2000+ “seen bys,” but ~38 link clicks. One would expect that paying twice as much to promote a post would lead to twice as many “seen bys,” however this repeatedly fails to happen. Instead, paying twice as much leads to half as many “seen bys” and twice as many clicks.
Keep in mind, regardless of how much we pay, we’re supposed to receive a focused targeted audience based upon the friends of our members. Paying more to promote the same type of content shouldn’t lead to less “seen bys.”
Currently with Facebook paid promotions, we’re seeing something completely new… and shocking.
http://lennoxtutoring.com/2012/10/08/facebook-paid-promotions-legitimate/
I think I will use promoted post only when I have a blog post that I know everyone will be thrilled to see.
The other post reached 31% probably triple the normal reach. The part that is quite disturbing is that our reach was already quite decent prior to Facebook implementing this new feature. At least 1/3 of the traffic to our site was from our Facebook Fanpage. We have over 13,000 fans.