Oh bite me, was the first line of thought as I pondered whether I really HAD to start a Facebook page for this new website. I’m not interested in re-inventing the wheel, but this site is not intended to become a large corporate money-making venture so why bother? Those were my second thoughts.
I’ve also been around the web-o-sphere a bit, many years of experience doing a variety of projects, and know that sometimes something can start as one thing then morph into something completely different. So what if my site did become a money-maker down the line, would I regret not having started a Facebook business page from the start?
I had mixed success with the page from my old travel website – South America Living. I believe in organic growth, not buying likes to push up stats that then mean virtually nothing as the people you have connected with have no real interest in what you have to say, or what the site is about. A few may, but most won’t. So why play that game?
The answer is usually because it helps with Google ratings and rates you can charge advertisers, that kind-of thing. But if you are strictly looking at the financial end, money back from money spent, it proves a bit useless.
“Once we started posting on our Facebook page, we were shocked, shocked, to see that not all the users that liked our page were seeing our posts. For example, with over 6,000 likes on our page, a typical post would only be seen by fifty to several hundred people. To reiterate, only 1% to 5% of the people that liked our page saw our posts. If we were justifying our expense as analogous to building a database of emails, then it was a database that only allowed you to access a tiny, randomly selected, subset each time it was used.”
Does Facebook reward people who put up business pages? Er, no. Facebook just comes up with new ways of trying to get money out of anyone who chooses to participate in its create a biz page program – and often times very annoying ways at that.
I remember getting a bunch of new likes from fellow travel bloggers, and then seeing my numbers on the page not change. What? Facebook had made a change in how you are logged in to your page, for the likes to show on other pages. Oh, that makes sense and let’s waste our time on something of little value anyway worrying about that.
Then came the sharp decrease in numbers of people who were reading my posts, and I wondered what had happened. More backend changes by Facebook, and a new setting on the page to ‘promote my posts’ to reach more of my audience… paying Facebook for what was happening organically before.
No thank you Facebook.
The quote above is from an article I found this morning on Forbes.com – “Facebook Pages Are a Bad Investment For Small Businesses“.
It is an excellent case study by someone who was helping set-up a corporate site, and realized after crunching a few numbers how little value they got out of the money they spent paying for advertising on Facebook – first for likes to the business page, then to promote posts to reach more of the audience.
You can read the full article by clicking here. Thank you Forbes.
Conclusion? Facebook pages may be of use for sites that need to grow numbers to appeal to online advertisers. For businesses selling a product, the money spent advertising on a company Facebook page is most likely better spent elsewhere.