When it began, Facebook was the world's greatest free high school yearbook.
Now, for some, it's gone pay-to-play.
A Facebook policy announced in late April called Promoted Posts invites
owners of some Facebook pages (those with more than 400 "likes," expressions
of interest from other users) to pay for expanded "reach" to their audience.
Hobbyists, enthusiasts, musicians, and other individuals run these pages,
as do sports teams, political campaigns, nonprofits, and businesses (including
The Inquirer). Some would be fine with paying. Some wouldn't.
The thing is, you didn't have to pay before. With Promoted Posts, when
the person or group who runs a page posts new content, it reaches on average
16 percent of the page's followers, according to Facebook. That's free.
Want more reach? You can press a button and get a pay schedule, starting
from $5 per post. More gets you more reach. Facebook will tell you how many
more people you'll reach per price. It's not a one-scale-fits-all system;
Facebook uses a complicated system to figure variations among pages. But
imagine a page with 6,200 followers, of which 16 percent would be about 992.
It might be offered 400 more for $5, or 700 more for $10, or 1,100 more for
$15, and so on.
A promoted post is marked as such when it appears.
"Facebook is clearly looking to try to raise more revenue, especially as
questions about their ad model keep getting raised," says Dan Petty, social
media editor for the Denver Post.
Since its celebrated (and troubled) first day of trading May 18, Facebook
has fended off allegations that its ads don't work, and it is searching for
ways to make its features deliver for itself and its new investors. Promoted
Posts may be one such way. Some worry that a "Promoted Posts" policy may
descend on all Facebook users before long.
Facebook officials declined to comment on the record. But they said
Promoted Posts were not new and did not apply to all pages. It's naive, they
add, to expect all posts to reach all followers. They never did. And those
that did reach their targets often were not looked at. (That's the
all-important distinction: between just seeing something and engaging it.
Everyone wants engaged eyeballs.)
They say Facebook is not withholding or taking back anything but, rather,
is offering a service to help you beat that 16 percent average. And it doesn't
cost much. Its reach is much better than other much-used promotional tools.
Think of direct mail, which doesn't even reach 1 percent of target audiences.
When you log on to Facebook, you can't see absolutely everything. So how
to determine what to show you?
Enter EdgeRank, a Facebook algorithm that decides. It weighs three
factors: affinity (the interest you've shown before in this topic, person, or
page), weight (the amount of time you've spent with said target -- in other
words, the engagement you've shown); and time (the freshness of the post). In
effect, EdgeRank filters posts (interesting to you or not) and followers of
those posts (folks who engage or don't).
Social media consultant Thomas Baekdal calls the policy a "conflict of
interest": People who run pages are "paying Facebook to reach the people who
have already decided to follow you, who Facebook in turn has decided to filter
