I started out as self employed again this autumn. It's going well so far but I figured I should join the 21st century so I gave the business a facebook presence. Last week I decided to try a little promotion so I paid the princely sum of 7 quid to "boost" one of my posts. (Yes I know). The idea being that facebook would get my post to appear in folks' news feed as a "sponsored post". Normally your posts only appear in the feeds of your friends, those who are in groups you post it to etc. The "boost" option means that people you have no current connection to will see your post. In theory a worthy way of promoting the business.
At the same time I did this I shared the post to a few local groups that I'm in. A local business group, a couple of buy and sell ones, that sort of thing.

Facebook dubs someone seeing your post in their feed as a "reach". Reaches obtained by you having friends, sharing in groups, others sharing it too etc are dubbed "organic reach". Reaches obtained by facebook boosting your post are dubbed "paid reach".

I sat back and have watched the results over the past few days. The organic reach did well straight away. hit 1000 people in just over a day. Paid reach was pitiful at first. Remember, you are paying facebook to put that post in the feeds of your target 'audience'. After a few days the organic reach was about 6 times the paid reach! Which is bad enough, especially as I set it with my target audience being, everyone over 18 within 20 odd miles of here.
But what has happened since is like well dodgy.
The organic reach has been going...down...whilst the paid reach goes up...The first night I noticed it it was one for one. Literally one for one!
There's only one conclusion to that. As soon as facebook boosts your post to the feed of someone who has already seen it via "organic reach", they claim it. They claim that is them that generated that reach! Even though it has naturally been seen by that person before facebook could be bothered to make them see it again.
Dodgy fekkers. They must rely on people not being as sad as me and not noticing what they do.

To add, at this moment I estimate about a third of facebook's claimed paid reach views are ones that have been knocked off of the organic reach.
The implication to me is that they are obtaining your fiat under false pretenses. They're manipulating figures to make it look worthwhile paying them.
On a larger scale it may well be a worthy thing to do, to pay fb to promote your business. On a local level? Nope.

I wouldnt doubt it, i dont trust them either.

Ive boosted a few posts myself for the other joint btw, my only experience of it..... it didnt seem to do much of anything versus unboosted organic reaches so i never bothered again after giving them a small amount $$$ myself.

It looks to me like once again, if you aint part of the club, they make your presence less far reaching and hence less relevant, whilst attempting to convince you of the opposite.

It's just a rip off isn't it. And how hard can it be? They keep telling me 'there are 74k people in your area'. Ok so put my post in those folks news feeds then, like i paid you to do. The actual reaches they've generated are around 500 i'd say. Pitiful. They're just hoovering up the fiat.
Like you, Novum, i'll not be lining their pockets again. It was an experiment and the results are in. Fb are borderline thieves and you can do better yourself with minimal effort, for free.

I have thought of this many times too... It looks promising, "Pay us 5€ and your post will reach 1200 more people." Bullshite!

I have thought of it because it would be useful for promoting my music, coming gigs etc.... It would be so useful if everybody within our town and few neighboring ones saw that there's a gig coming up. But there's no way I give a single dime to the mindfuckbook, no effin way. I've heard similar stories that the paid promotion on fb is pure bullcrap. I have one friend who have done it to promote their band, they ofc claim it works, but I smell a rat on that one. Must not loose face in the scene and all that, must not look stupid.

It seems that my gut feeling about paid reach was right. Its just legalized robbery basically.

"It would be so useful if everybody within our town and few neighboring ones saw that there's a gig coming up"
That's it in a nutshell isn't it. That's all you want them to do when you're 'keeping it local'. For people in your area that may be interested, to have a post pop up that lets them know your 'thing' exists. Whatever that thing may be.
And that's what FB claims to offer. Yet out of the 74,000 people in my area that FB claims to have using it, FB have actually barely scratched the surface. OK, it hasn't cost me much personally but that's not the point. The point is that they offer a service, take your fiat and then do pretty much fek all. And when there are many many people paying out for the 'service' all over the World, it sure mounts up!

Facebook are dodgy and rip offs from whichever angle you look at them, and now this level too. Overt dishonesty. Thanks for the head up dubs because I was thinking about rejoining F/B and doing the same to "promote" my books. I won't now. And I recently read that the deadly dishonest Zuckerberg had found god! Not sure which god he found, but it will still have horns on I bet.

Can't write any more now because I have literally shattered my right elbow and this hurts The next Great Unfinished Novel will just have to wait - so stick that in your pipe, F/B, and smoke it (which they probably will).

Its quite a dilemma.... I'm on fb because I pretty much have to. We deal about our rehearsal room there, everything from rent to usage to what not. Then fb is the only forum with visibility () to promote my music stuff. I don't want to make constant stream of "irrelevant" videos on youtube which is another can of worms on this regard. They're not allowing anything of real content to reach any popularity worth a mention, unless that channel has made the deal. Guess twice will I ever make THE deal even if it was offered. And then there's the utmost stupidity of it all that fb is the only forum on which you can find "everybody." People have forgot how email and phone works pretty much and the fastest way to reach them is by fb's private(What a joke that is!) chat.

I'm waiting for the the day when some other social media website makes a huge avalanche of popularity, something that isn't completely corrupt. I highly doubt that as all this bullshit invariably infiltrates everything that gains enough momentum. You know the drill, the owners are offered a deal they can't refuse and then screwgle or some other CIA run spynetwork owns the whole thing and then its just buy old boss, welcome the new one.

cantata wrote:
I still think it would be worth you using fb to promote yout books, just that it isn't worth paying them to do it. You can do a better job yourself by joining and posting in groups and by letting your...yuk...friends network...do it's thing.

What's this about your elbow? I hope you're not suffering too much

As if now fb has continued to plunder the organic reach and add that to the paid reach. The promotion ends today and will not be repeated

cantata wrote: I don't know if you have a Mac or PC, but I rarely type anything, I dictate all of my work and then proofread it. It might take a bit of practice, but it saves your wrists, joints, etc. If you need any guidance on how to do it then let me know.

You will find that once you've mastered it, if you right write text that doesn't feature any obscure proper names then the machine is actually excellent at dictating your work. For example, in that sentence it only got the word 'write' wrong! It can probably transcribe what you speak 90-95% accurately, and then you just have the job of some minor editing to do. But you do have to speak clearly and in a slightly stilted fashion, you can't speak to the machine the way that you would speak to a human. But I use it every day, saves me tonnes of time and effort.

Fuck facewank.

And I believe the last thing I said on the place was to directly throw some kind of cunt comment straight at Zucker himself lol

Yes, i think it was

psketti wrote:
Yes he's really shaking in his shoes now, ain't he

Black Cloud wrote:

Yes cloud...that's why i dun it

Fuck the piece of shite fb. It would be so useful if it wouldn't be completely corrupt and full of adverts... Those advertisements have started to piss me off big time. Adblock removes most of them from showing but some time ago they introduced new kind of advert which shows up regardless, every tenth or so post is a fucking advert!

To add insult to injury, I know their advert bots (and who knows what else) are reading the "private" chats all the time. One day I had adverts concerning something I had mentioned on a "private" chat by name and nowhere else I talked about the whole thing that day. Its just coincidence of course. It pisses me off, there's no illusion of privacy about it any more and it makes me paranoid when I'm talking about something that's really nobody's business...

Haha, Hex. I love the irony there that i started the thread complaining about how fb had done a piss poor job of advertising my business

Haha, right.

I think that about 90% of fb adverts seem to be big company bullshit. And they're definitely paying more than few coins for their advert campaigns. The reason why I'm blocking adverts is that the "content" of these is most of the time so annoying... Seeing one makes me feel like my IQ drops by few points per each advert. Oh and the small and "local" stuff fb is pushing on me is usually breweries, something to do with music or LEFTIST LIBERAL(?!?!?) politicians... Most of the time, not the kind of sites or people I'm interested about.

Anyway, fb is very very selective on who gets visibility. Small businesses paying few quid for it aren't probably on the actual support list.