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A few years ago I really got into my Facebook account. I had tons of friends and was a part of all sorts of “truther” and conspiracy groups. Whenever there was some kind of event happening, a big thread would blow up on my Facebook wall. Likewise, when I had important news to share I would simply update my status and the news would spread instantly like wildfire. It was extremely satisfying to see how fast and effective Facebook worked for getting the word out. And yes, at times it could get a little addictive too.
At the time I wasn’t even really paying too much attention to my stats. All I know is that my account was 1 year old, I had about 3,000 friends and was a member of about 20 groups. When I posted something, sometimes I’d get close to 200 likes , 20-50 shares, and 15-30 comments.
Then at the beginning of 2015 I thought I’d “go pro” to help promote my business. It seemed to make perfect sense at the time. I read tons of articles that said a professional Facebook page was the way to go to really get your stuff seen. So I converted my personal Facebook account into a business page. Instantly my stats plummeted into the abyss. I had friends everywhere who honestly thought I died or something because they suddenly stopped hearing from me.
This is because Facebook control’s who see’s your information in their feeds. And quite honestly, that’s the only way that most people see your stuff, is through their feed. Yes there is a function where they can go to your page and change a setting so that they always see your stuff in their feeds, but 99% of people don’t do that. So nobody was seeing my stuff. I had to start all over again. I opened a new personal Facebook account and went through the process of building my friends list back up again.
Within one year I had surpassed my previous friends count and was now up to 4,000 friends. I joined 200 groups. I started spending money for Facebook Ads to pay for people to see my posts in their feed. I found someone who worked on other Facebook groups that shared my audience and paid them to help me get my organic reach up. I learned how to read all my Facebook insights, created a strategy on a spreadsheet , and then started to really apply myself to growing my Facebook reach.
I got a ton of REAL insight (not just Facebooks cute little name for it) on how this stuff REALLY works. This is because I know some people personally. I speak to them and ask the right questions about what they do and how they do it. I would look at their stats and wonder how in the world they ever got 1,000+ likes on some stupid kitty meme. Then I learned how much money some of them were spending. One of those pages spent $10,000 in two months on paid Facebook reach in order to get their new agey “200,000 souls” (meaning people who like their page). Another person I know hired a marketing team of 11 full time staff to get his Facebook reach out to people. The money I spent and the work that I put into it did in fact get me more “reach”… but I had zero conversions and never got any of my money back through sales. Plus I noticed that I also had nowhere near as much as the kind of reach I had a couple of years ago when I had one dinky little personal page and spent nothing on Facebook Ad’s. I even have a business friend who spent $500,000 on Facebook Ads. His opinion now is that he’s giving up on Facebook because it does nothing for him or his business.
I went pretty deep into my research with Facebook. Here is what I can share with my readers . In the last year they have made a lot of changes to their platform. Most notable is that you get a lot less for your advertising money and they just raised all the prices. They increased the amount of hoops you need to jump through in order to get your Ad approved. They won’t tell you that your ad hasn’t been approved until AFTER they take your money for it. And forget about a refund.
The thought of privacy is a joke as every alphabet agency is monitoring everything you write on Facebook. I’ve seen droves of people leaving Facebook and leaving their final “F U Facebook” post on their wall. Facebook has been used to enforce a police state on the public as posts are used in court cases and also to get people fired from their jobs. This is probably a big reason why.
Facebook takes the side of the antagonizer and punishes the victim through its upside down reporting system. I have trolls that have tried to hurt me and my business. They love to attack my Facebook account. Because these rotten scoundrels bogusly reported my account I’ve had my Facebook account frozen several times, each one with a probation period I had to sit and wait through. Then I was forced to submit a million forms of ID and change my name on Facebook because a troll that works for the criminal Keshe foundation reported my account as a fake. (don’t even get me started on that one!) Facebook tried to stall having my account turned back on until I reminded them that I was one of their paying customers and they were cutting off their own funding by keeping my account frozen. Magically that got my account turned back on… go figure.
Then there’s the completely backwards censoring that Facebook does. They love to censor my posts (especially because I’m talking about Real Free Energy) But then I see bold XXX rated pornography photos all over the place on other peoples Facebook walls. Gee, somehow those pictures seem to make it through Facebooks stellar security screenings while mine do not? And I’ve even reported some other people to Facebook because they’ve got porn all over their wall… Facebook comes back to me stating that this person did not “violate their community standards”.
I’ll keep my Facebook profiles for now and use them very sparingly. I’ve moved my real online activity to my own website and mailing lists. I think Facebook hit its peak a couple of years ago. Now it’s gone flat and is soon to go the same route as myspace. It has too much censorship and too much control over people. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.
