This is Why You Should Think Twice Before Investing on Facebook Again!

Entrepreneurs and small businesses use Facebook to engage with their customers, get feedback and provide information on products, services and offers. However, that has been getting harder to do.

To better monetize its platform, Facebook has been reducing the reach of unpaid posts for months now. This means that status updates from your pages have been less visible in Newsfeeds. This is backed by hard statistics. Adobe’s Global Digital Advertising Report found that from September, 2013 to September, 2014,  the reach for organic post impressions fell by 50% while reach for paid impressions increased by 5%.

Unfortunately, that’s not all. Facebook has now gone one step ahead and said that all overly promotional updates will be removed from the Newsfeeds of users. The company has defined promotional materials in three areas as:

• Promotion of apps or products
• Highlighting a competition or promotion
• Re-use of advertising content

Since newsfeeds are not unlimited, speaking logically, paid posts are bound to replace organic updates

If you are sitting there with your jaw open, you are not the only one. According to a survey, more than 80% of small businesses use Facebook as a medium to increase brand awareness and get new customers. After this change, unpaid posts will become pretty much useless. If you want to reach your audience, you will have to spend money to do so.

This is unfair because over the years, people have spent a lot of time on building their Facebook fan pages. They’ve spent money, invested time and reaped the rewards as well. But now, Facebook’s emphasis on milking every cent out of their platform at the cost of the very people who built it has changed the landscape.

Simply stating, those millions of fans that were bought by your top dollars have become useless

With the new changes, Facebook is saying they don’t care how many followers you have and how much time and money you spent on accumulating them. If you want to reach them, you will have to pay. Paid posts cost from $5 to thousands of dollars and for small businesses and individuals, paying for all posts is not going to be possible.

Not to mention, paid posts on FB require no Fans — you can simply pay dollars to reach more audience, regardless if they are your fans or not, which means that those millions of Fans that were bought by your top dollars have become simply useless.

Paid posts on FB require no Fans — you can simply pay dollars to reach more audience, regardless if they are your fans or not

All we can say is that this is the last warning sign for marketers who are using Facebook advertising. It has effectively become a pay-to-use platform where you will be lucky if your posts reach even 2% of your followers – and it’s only going to get worse from January 2015.

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