7 Reasons Why Facebook Doesn’t Give a Sh*t About Your Business Page

morpheous on your facebook page

morpheous on your facebook page

Recently I’ve started to wonder why some businesses (including ours) even post to Facebook anymore. No matter how many fans or likes you have, it seems as if Facebook is continually making it harder for pages to get into their fans’ News Feeds. But why should Facebook wage war against businesses and brands?

1. Facebook Only Cares About Profit

It’s simple: for Facebook, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is Wall Street. Every decision at the company is made with an eye on the bottom line. Since non-business users typically don’t pay for advertising or self-promotion, Facebook is looking to squeeze every last nickel out of businesses. Ever since Facebook introduced its paid advertising platform, page engagement has fallen fast. Just ask Facebook superstar George Takei who has publicly complained about being able to reach only 16% of his hard-earned fanbase organically. Even Mark Cuban is looking for greener pastures; he asks why businesses who are strapped for cash shouldn’t focus less their Facebook presence and instead take advantage of more reliable social networks. “I am recommending that we de-emphasize pushing consumers or partners to Like us on Facebook and focus on building up our followings across all existing social media platforms and to evaluate those that we feel can grow a material following,” he said. “In the past we put Facebook first, Twitter second. Facebook has been moved to the bottom of a longer list. So why would brands that can’t afford the algorithmic presentation risk or the financial cost want to continue to drive their user interaction by investing in Facebook if there are alternatives?” I couldn’t agree more.

2. Your EdgeRank Sucks and It’s Unfair

Recent changes to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm have significantly decreased the frequency of brands appearing in users’ News Feeds or eliminating them from News Feeds completely. Now, stripped of some of their most vocal advocates, pages receive only a fraction of the fan engagement they used to. Here’s something to chew on: the average News Feed acceptance rate is less than 0.2% according to the latest available data. This means it’s almost 30 times easier to get into Harvard than to be published in the News Feed.

3. Article Links Have Zero Visibility

Sure, Facebook will distribute the funny picture you post of a cat riding a dog wearing a propeller hat, and you’ll get a few likes. But what about when you post a real article or, for that matter, any other link back to your site? The sad fact is your post is not going to receive many likes. This is not necessarily because your fans don’t care but rather because they aren’t seeing your post in the first place. It’s common knowledge that images dominate the News Feed, seeing at least 4 times the amount of engagement as links. And if you think that’s bad just take a look at our page where silly images tend to outdo our articles in terms of engagement by nearly 1000%.

4. App Activity is Hidden

Facebook has made a huge push for apps to integrate into their open graph, yet most app activity is invisible on users’ timelines. Have you recently shared a YouTube video but were unable to find it on your timeline? It’s a little-known fact that to display app activity users have to enter their timeline settings and enable apps to display activity. Nice move, Facebook, but can you really expect users to remember to do that for all apps? What’s even more frustrating is that I’ve enabled activities posts from sites like SoundCloud and StumbleUpon and yet they still fail to appear in my activities stream.

5. Promoting Posts is Way Too Expensive

This has really gotten out of hand: Facebook is looking to charge you as much as possible to reach your own fanbase. For about $75 per post, you can expect to reach close to all of your followers. This may fly for larger brands, but for small businesses and regular folks this is a complete joke. Most blogs don’t even make $50 a day, and many don’t make that in a month. Small companies will likely never make back what they spend on promoted Facebook posts.

6. Facebook’s Mission Statement is a Lie

Facebook claims to want to “make the world a more open and connected” place. But you know better! Hell, Facebook doesn’t even want you to connect with your own fans anymore, let alone its own. If your company provides services similar to Facebook’s, Facebook will block your company’s app from accessing its data, period.
Facebook's Mission Statement

7. Page Activity No Longer Appears in the News Ticker

This is perhaps the greatest slight of all: though I’ve heard no official announcement yet, I’ve noticed that pages DO NOT appear in the streaming News Ticker to the right of the News Feed anymore. I haven’t seen a business update in days, even from pages I’ve subscribed to and with whom I interact heavily. Other Facebook users have reported the same findings: brands are now simply invisible in the news Ticker. Though I’ve posed this question/issue to Facebook I’m still waiting for a response.

This is a huge fail on the part of Facebook for businesses and we can only hope that this is some sort of bug. Yes, business page updates still appear in the News Feed, but from my experience that streaming ticker provided DashBurst huge amounts of engagement as I’ve witnessed a 66% reduction in engagement since this change. Is Facebook trying to force pages to make apps that interact with the timeline? Or, even more sinister, perhaps they’re looking to cut down even more on business page views in an attempt to get more businesses to dish out cash for promotions. Either way, I wouldn’t give Facebook another dime and will surely be looking to cancel any promotions we do have running. What’s the point of buying new likes and fans when they’re not going to see your freaking posts anyway?

Maybe it’s high time for businesses to unite and take a stand against Facebook by boycotting the site. If Facebook doesn’t want to be friendly with business pages anymore, why should we give the site any love or hard-earned money? When does our time and effort start to exceed our ROI? Are you really getting any traffic or leads from Facebook anyway? Or are you just plugged into the matrix of the biggest time suck known to the history of mankind?

Daniel Zeevi

By Daniel Zeevi

Daniel is a social network architect, web developer, infographic designer, writer, speaker and founder of DashBurst. Full-time futurist and part-time content curator, always on the hunt for disruptive new technology, creative art and web humor.

41 comments

  1. It’s a scam I tell ya, a scam… the amount of time and money required for a small businesses to be seen is absurd and would be better spent on more creative endeavors.

  2. I think the point you mentioned about “images dominate the News Feed” is the sad part of this media. I have a text based site and I feel that I’m forced to generate image base content instead of quality content – and as you stated my image feeds gets a lot more attention…

  3. So when I put my latest video as a post on my FB fan page, it doesn’t go to my 500 followers of my brand/fan page? Where does it go?

    1. They only allow an estimate 10% of your followers to see it- if you want the rest to see it, you know the ones that have liked your page because they want to see it, you have to pay Facebook! And they still only let you see a portion based on how much money you are willing to spend

  4. Great article! Summarizes what I really have been trying to put into context regarding what has happened to all the interaction with our small business on FB. Facebook has basically told small business owners to go to hell. Those that took the time to establish and interact with a decent fan base have lost almost all interaction. I still post to FB, but am leaning more toward G+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest now. Don’t like it when a company does hostile things to force up the bottom line, and this was a terribly hostile action by FB.

  5. I use Facebook because its where my target audience is. When they move, I’ll move with them. I’m on a lot of other channels but it’s the one that I hear from them the most.

  6. We have been marketring on the Internet for 18 years and since Facebook came out I don’t think that we have received a single sale from one of our over 5000 contacts. We have discovered through experimentation the best way to get sales leads and then most important of all, to get the sale.

    1. Its true I discoverd that also and woudnt count on facebook as its essentialy a social network for sharing ideas , ect of non commercial gain . However it does raise awareness of what you do as an individual , so one can say it does work but in a differrent way, just not in thhe way one would think initially as the consiousness is changing and face book is a tool for that change , people need to retrain themselves from trying to make “money” from facebook . Rather go with the flow instead of pushing products for gain , it goes against the grain . Just my humble opinion .

  7. All interesting points, but here is the thing.. Facebook cares only about their customer. If they allowed brands / pages to spam their (let’s be truthful) crap all day long then the fb customer would LEAVE in a second. People come to FB to see their friends baby photos NOT to see the latest chest beating from Coke or P&G. Imagine if that were the case. Facebook would be dead in the water in about 5 nano seconds. So, yes, they care about $$$ and this is how they ensure that their most valuable asset (their user) keeps coming back, and back and back.

  8. I 100% agree about followers not seeing posts. My page was doing well…interactive likes and comments. I was using another site to get my followers and everyone was seeing my posts. But once I began advertising those numbers dramatically decreased. This is when I realized that paid advertisement of FB is a waste. It’s a set up. And there is no way to go back to my regular set up of reaching ,y audience organically once I began to pay. Mistake

  9. Now I’m going to enter in an idea that might be truly foreign to most here… that is that this is a SOCIAL networking site. It has never claimed to be a business networking site (as have other sites) and, as one other person has commented here, “… it is for sharing ideas, etc. of non-commercial gain.”. That’s right. This site was was never meant for building up a business. It never promised that you could easily promote your business to thousands with a single click but rather, it is for social relationships.
    There is something else to be learned here, that is that those “thousands” that you see as business prospects are NOT protesting to get back on your notification/promotional lists, they are not protesting that businesses no longer have this capability. I do not take this to mean they don’t want the products, I’m taking it to mean just what it is, they don’t want the notifications/promotions HERE at facebook.
    I believe the unimaginable has happened here at fb, facebook has actually gotten something right for once. : ))
    p.s. I’d like to add this: I believe there is room for the arts and the sale of arts and some people-based services here, as these are all based on and driven by affinity for a person, not an object.

    1. Totally agree. Chat with family and friends on FB, do business elsewhere. We used to preach that FB could be a friendly presence of a business in the community; then we got wrapped up in ROI and blamed FB.

  10. OK, here’s another thing I’ve been wondering about concerning facebook. I paid for a facebook ad for my jewelry business, and, wow! I got 250 new likes in a week (huge for me). But I started checking them out and I noticed that many of them had a similar kind of artwork on their cover photo (kind of other-worldly, with fairies and stuff), and often strange names, too. Also most of them had thousands of likes, so really, how important was my business going to be to them…anyway, I was wondering if perhaps facebook has developed a store of fake users they give you when you pay for ads. Also, I tried the same ad a second and third time, and got very few likes, but this time they seemed to mostly be real people. Then, I’ve got one guy (Moumen Mysterioux) I keep banning from my child sponsorship site, to protect the kids, and he keeps popping up again. Any insight or thoughts on this?

  11. We hear this a lot. It was like the early days of Google when if you had a website, you’d rank easily. Those who just sat back and complained didn’t make it very far. We actually like it when people complain, since it means less competition for us and clients.

    Everyone here is a capitalist or has some sort of business goals. If you execute profitably, what’s the problem, right?

    Now if you’re doing things inefficiently (for example, hitting the “boost post” button designed for newbies), then no wonder it’s not working. You can’t be lazy and think things that worked back in 2007 will work in 2013. Up your game!

    1. I have limited time to figure out the riddle of FB. I’ve engaged knowledgeable people for assistance with little tangible result. They make it so difficult they obviously have put up barriers to limit businesses getting free exposure.

  12. We normally just use facebook to draw possible new clients/inquiries to view a few samples of our work. We have a company website but facebook is just so much easier to update. We never intended FB to draw in clients, but instead, just a “get to know a bit about us” kinda of thing. Then if the client decides to work with us, we can go further with the “get to know each other better” and resort back to good old emailing, sending photos for product offers etc. Generating new clients may also happen in facebook but this should not be relied upon. It would be a bonus if this happens…

  13. You are right- NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE. Get over it.
    Facebook was not intended to be used as a site for you to promote your business. It is a SOCIAL networking site that started in a college dorm room. 10 years ago, your business wouldn’t have even be allowed to have a page due to Facebook’s college email exclusivity. So while you are stomping your feet and complaining that no one “likes” your page, or posts, or business- you should be thanking Facebook for even allowing you to easily upload information and photos about your company- for free. I ignore most of my acquaintances’ posts about getting married, finding a new job, or having a child- what makes you think I care about your company’s post about your “new upgrade” that, more often than not, Google has already come up with and done better. And to make matters worse, your 53 year old media consultant is doing it all wrong, and the high school intern you hired doesn’t know anything about brand management in media. Your Facebook page is not successful because Facebook doesn’t work for all businesses. In fact, it works for a very small few. And while we paid for friends in college, I know better than to pay for fans on Facebook. Sorry small businesses, looks like you’ll have to do work the old fashioned way.

    Your brand on Facebook does not have loyal fans (so don’t fret too much about not being able to reach them)- For example, we “like” something to receive a free coupon, then never return to the page. Successful advertising on Facebook is organic, not forced from the company itself. The most successful advertising on Facebook does not originate with the business’s page anyway- viral videos like Kmart’s “ship your pants” were copied from YouTube and posted from friend to friend because it was funny, and we actually DID LIKE IT.

    So please Businesses, do as Daniel suggested and BOYCOTT Facebook. You are wasting your money and my time. Maybe then we will be able to get back to what Facebook is all about- which, of course, is stalking ex-boyfriends. There are more points to be made here, but I have some photos to tag. Cheers!

    1. all solid points! if Facebook was still a private company there wouldn’t be this article, but since facebook is a publicly traded company, generating it’s revenue through monetizing business advertising on both mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms, they need to have businesses of all sizes as their number one priority. This is exactly why Mark Zuckerberg is considered by many industry professionals to be a terrible CEO because he was slow at monetizing the mobile advertising platforms before going public, thus, losing literally billions of dollars of revenue and plummeting their stock price. The are being dominated right now by Apples iOS apps and Google’s domination of the android market…they even had both of their chief mobile and table officers leave for jobs at Google, putting them further behind the 8 ball.

  14. How are other photographers with both FB profiles and pages? It’s a bit cumbersome to keep up double posting and yet the stats and customization features of pages seem valuable.

    These days I am posting much more on my FB profile so I started asking people to follow me there. Almost all posts are public anyway.

  15. Facebook is a BUSINESS, businesses exist to make money. Create content that has real value and engagement to your users, be of service to your community! Everyone is overwhelmed with too much information, so to stand out in the crowd, and have the best chance of going viral, only post AMAZING content, generally visual. If you are unable to create visual content for your biz, it probably won’t work on facebook. This is based upon how users like to interact with the content, not fb. Oh, and don’t take it so personally! Life is short. 🙂

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