Business News

How Facebook has literally taken your friends, fans for ransom

Facebook made some changes recently that were quiet, sneaky, and still wildly misunderstood by many, but if you’ve noticed that the number of people seeing your Facebook Page updates has plummeted, it’s because Facebook wants you to pay up…

Published

8 years ago

October 31, 2012

Charlene Jimenez

Big changes at Facebook – maybe not such a great option…

When it comes to free social media, you, as a professional, have quite a few options. None have been more popular than Facebook—until recently, that is. Facebook has recently launched their new promotion options, for both company and individuals’ pages. However, many are now weighing in, claiming that this “option” isn’t much of an option. For some companies, it can either mean professional death or an overextended bank account.

Here’s how it has played out.

Starting a few months ago, innumerable businesses across the country noticed that their normal traffic from Facebook to their websites dropped significantly. It was later discovered that only about 15% of their fans were seeing their company updates on Facebook. So, what happened to the 85% who willingly liked their pages but now weren’t seeing their updates? Now, businesses have to pay depending on how many subscribers they want to reach. Keep in mind that these subscribers have already liked their pages voluntarily, and, undoubtedly, because they want to see these company updates. So, unless you pay for each post, only a small handful will actually see what you post.

You’re going to pay if you want to reach your own fans

While the idea behind this change could actually make business sense, Facebook’s execution has been less than desirable. Let’s start with the per-post fees. As of right now, the fees are based on the percentage of your fans you want to reach and your geographic location. The Dangerous Minds blog details their experience with promoted posts and their cost. For them, they have to pay $200 per post in order to have a post on the newsfeeds of all of their subscribers.

Now think of the small business or the freelancer trying to promote their businesses. These types of professionals are essentially being shut out by Facebook. Companies who are used to posting ten posts per day are looking at roughly $2,000 each day. Other than large corporations with expansive budgets, who can afford those kinds of fees? Definitely not small business owners in today’s economy.

Facebook created a solution to a problem. However, Facebook also created the problem first—on purpose—by limiting businesses’ outreach to their subscribers well before the idea of promoted posts was released. Facebook created panic so that more businesses would be inclined to accept promoted posts as a reasonable and easy fix to their lack of traffic and post shares.

Your Facebook “friends” are being held for ransom

Here’s the problem. No one likes to pay for something that they originally got for free. Facebook may feel they are making up for decreasing stock values and increasing the worth of their company, but what they’re really doing is pushing their best customers and users away. These users will go somewhere else, and chances are it will be to a direct competitor.

Promoted posts may be a short-term fix for Facebook’s value problems, but it will ultimately leave them only with large corporations advertising to each other, as Facebook is also charging individual users $7 to promote personal posts. So, if you’ve wondered where your Facebook friends have gone, now you know they’ve been taken for a ransom.

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Charlene Jimenez

The American Genius Staff Writer: Charlene Jimenez earned her Master's Degree in Arts and Culture with a Creative Writing concentration from the University of Denver after earning her Bachelor's Degree in English from Brigham Young University in Idaho. Jimenez's column is dedicated to business and technology tips, trends and best practices for entrepreneurs and small business professionals.

14 Comments

btrandolph

October 31, 2012 at 9:27 am

remember when the internet was all about free exchange of ideas? users were outraged by the idea of commercial use of the channel and pledged to exit en masse if they ever saw an advertisement. we all know how that worked out.

the changes to the edgerank algorithm controlling post visibility is in one sense a return to this idealism. social marketers have dismissed traditional mass promotion as broadcast and interruption marketing, sniffing “it’s about the conversation.” the changes to facebook are asking marketers to walk the walk. facebook is not penalizing brands and organizations whose fans are interacting with them through likes and comments and shares. effective marketers are having conversations. facebook is happy to let old-school marketers continue to shout – they are just asking them to pay for the opportunity as they would with any other promotional channel.

if a tree posts in the forest and nobody retweets it, does it make a sound?

Reply
- AGBeat
  
  October 31, 2012 at 9:49 am
  
  @btrandolph What about the one person business, what about the non-profit? It’s not just corporations being punished after being prompted, prodded, and pleaded with to join Facebook and give up their private information and drive traffic to the site for Facebook’s benefit. We could all sit by and allow our personal data to be repackaged and profited from, but when someone earns a fan, they should be reaching that fan on their newsfeed.
  Changing the rules (as FB often does) so dramatically is just wrong. This isn’t the same as the original days of the internet. Many of us remember them, and the algorithm change is NOT a return to that idealism, unless Facebook forces companies and non-profits to be limited in their reach to the fans they’ve earned. Again, this is not a return to idealism – let’s do some math here:
  Facebook = Property Manager
  Boutique = Page Owner
  Property Rent = Time sharing / gathering data for Facebook
  So in this scenario, a Property Manager puts a lock on a local Boutique’s door and claims that they must pay extra in order for the lock to come off *every time* someone waiting outside wants to come in. The boutique already has earned the customer that wants in, the property manager already has the rent, but without notice, there is an extra gatekeeper now between the two that doesn’t care if it bleeds the Boutique dry with fees not arbitrarily added during their lease (which would be illegal, by the way). In your scenario, there is no property manager, and the world is filled with nomadic squatters, but times have changed, and that world mostly keeps to itself on 4chan.
  The algorithm change not only punishes those who are actually good at social media and has earned fans, but limits Facebook’s long term growth – piss off enough people, and G+ is just sitting there, begging for people to actually use it…
  -@LaniAR
  
  Reply
  - AGBeat
    
    October 31, 2012 at 9:54 am
    
    I would add that I don’t believe this is exclusive to brands. Promoted posts exist for personal users as well, so again, I don’t agree that this is some way of making Facebook ideal like the old days of commercial-free interwebs.
    
    Reply
  - btrandolph
    
    October 31, 2012 at 1:06 pm
    
    @AGBeat @LaniAR apologies for implying that facebook was doing this out of idealism rather than monetizarion! my point was only that the effect of the changes pushes facebook marketing away from develop an audience and then talk AT it and more toward engagement.
    
    I don’t understand your question about the one-person business or non profit? non-profits are content machines whose primary revenue drivers are passion and engagement – facebook pages were made for these organizations. non-profits can use facebook to cultivate their most engaged fans and ideally raise awareness through those engaged constituents’ networks by encouraging them to share posts and fundraising appeals. if a non-profit is pushing stuff out to its network that no one responds to, then it’s time to look at the content strategy, not to get whingy when facebook cuts the size of its free lunch.
    
    for sole proprietors, facebook is an opportunity to build engaged followers, not a free megaphone to shout over and over to those who’ve expressed a passing interest. heck yes, fb changes the rules – it has investors to keep happy and like every business out there, a constant need to identify and develop revenue streams.
    
    your math metaphor is too confusing to address.
    
    Reply
Sheila Wall Bell

October 31, 2012 at 9:40 am

Maybe a must read, but wish I didn’t know it…ignorance can, indeed, be bliss? Now I’m just plain mad.

Reply
Jim Duncan

October 31, 2012 at 9:42 am

Yet another reason I absolutely loathe Facebook

Reply
StacyStateham

October 31, 2012 at 10:27 am

“For them, they have to pay $200 per post in order to have a post on the newsfeeds of all of their subscribers” – Page posts have never shown up in the newsfeeds of All Subscribers.. it has always, and still does to a large extent, depend on the EdgeRank of the page, engagement, etc. Pages that had low engagement rates prior to the change are getting filtered out even more than they did before. Pages that have high engagement should be just fine. If you’re posting quality content that your audience likes, there’s no need to panic. If you’re posting content that your audience doesn’t like, the problem isn’t Facebook’s algorithm, it’s your content. Here’s a link to the official Facebook statement on the subject… https://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/news-feed-engagement-and-promoted-posts-how-they-work

Reply
Diana Hoyt

October 31, 2012 at 10:50 am

Is Mark Zuckerberg TRYING to kill Facebook???? Sure seems like it. I’ll just find another venue. I won’t pay for any of this.

Reply
MattsMedia

November 1, 2012 at 6:10 pm

Lately I hear a lot of people tell me there is too much “noise” and irrelevant information on Facebook. If there was any adjustments to the News-Feed algorithm it would make the Facebook experience better for the non-business users (eg, the 99% 😉 – no complaints here, I’ll stick to FB ads for business.

Reply

Business News

This web platform for cannabis is blowing up online distribution

(BUSINESS NEWS) Dutchie, a website platform for cannabis companies, just octupled in value. Here’s what that means for the online growth of cannabis distribution.

Published

2 weeks ago

March 31, 2021

Jack Lloyd, Staff Writer

A small jar of cannabis on a desk with notebooks, sold online in a nicely made jar.

The cannabis industry has, for the most part, blossomed in the past few years, managing to hit only a few major snags along the way. One of those snags is the issue of payment processing, an issue compounded by predominantly cash-only transactions. Dutchie, a Bend, Oregon company, has helped mitigate that issue—and it just raised a ton of money.

Technically, Dutchie is a jack-of-all-trades service that creates and hosts websites for dispensaries, tracks product, processes orders, keeps stock of revenue, and so much more. While it was valued at around $200 million as recently as summer of 2020, a round of series C funding currently puts the company at around $1.7 billion—approximately 8 times its worth a mere 8 months ago.

There are a few reasons behind Dutchie’s newfound momentum. For starters, the pandemic made cannabis products a lot more accessible—and desirable—in states in which the sale of cannabis is legal. The ensuing surge of customers and demand certainly didn’t hurt the platform, especially given that Dutchie is largely responsible for keeping things on track during some of the more chaotic months for dispensaries.

Several states in which the sale of cannabis was illegal also voted to legalize recreational use, giving Dutchie even more stomping ground than they had prior to the lockdown.

Dutchie also recently took on 2 separate companies and their associated employees, effectively doubling their current staff. The companies are Greenbits—a resource planning group—and Leaflogix, which is a point-of-sale platform. With these two additions to their compendium, Dutchie can operate as even more of an all-in-one suite, which absolutely contributes to its value as a company.

Ross Lipson, who is Dutchie’s co-founder and current CEO, is fairly dismissive of investment opportunities for the public at the moment, saying he instead prefers to stay “focused with what’s on our plate” for the time being. However, he also appears open to the possibility of going public via an acquisition company.

“We look at how this decision brings value to the dispensary and the customer,” says Lipson. “If it brings value, we’d embark on that decision.”

For now, Dutchie remains the ipso facto king of cannabis distribution and sales—and they don’t show any plans to slow down any time soon.

Business News

Ford adopts flexible working from home schedule for over 30k employees

(BUSINESS NEWS) Ford Motor Co. is allowing employees to continue working from home even after the pandemic winds down. Is this the beginning of a trend for auto companies?

Published

3 weeks ago

March 22, 2021

Veronica Garcia, Staff Writer

Woman in car working on engineering now allowed a flexible schedule for working from home.

The pandemic has greatly transformed our lives. For the most part, learning is being conducted online. At one point, interacting with others was pretty much non-existent. Working in the office shifted significantly to working remotely, and it seems like working from home might not go away anytime soon.

As things slowly get back to a new “normal”, will things change again? Well, one thing is sure. Working from home will be a permanent thing for some people as more companies opt to continue letting people work remotely.

And, the most recent company on the list to do this is Ford Motor Co. Even after the pandemic winds down, Ford will allow more than 30,000 employees already working from home to continue doing so.

Last week, the automaker giant announced its “flexible hybrid model” schedule to its staff. The new schedule is set to start in the summer, and employees can choose to work remotely and come into the office for tasks that require face-to-face collaborations, such as meetings and group projects.

How much time an employee spends in the office will depend on their responsibilities, and flexible remote hours will need to be approved by an employee’s manager.

“The nature of work drives whether or not you can adopt this model. There are certain jobs that are place-dependent — you need to be in the physical space to do the job,” David Dubensky, chairman and chief executive of Ford Land, told the Washington Post. “Having the flexibility to choose how you work is pretty powerful. … It’s up to the employee to have dialogue and discussion with their people leader to determine what works best.”

Ford’s decision to implement a remote-office work model has to do in part with an employee survey conducted in June 2020. Results from the survey showed that 95% of employees wanted a hybrid schedule. Some employees even reported feeling more productive when working from home.

Ford is the first auto company to allow employees to work from home indefinitely, but it might not be the only one. According to the Post, Toyota and General Motors are looking at flexible options of their own.

Business News

Unify your remote team with these important conversations

(BUSINESS NEWS) More than a happy hour, consider having these poignant conversations to bring your remote team together like never before.

Published

3 weeks ago

March 19, 2021

Jack Lloyd, Staff Writer

Woman working in office with remote team

Cultivating a team dynamic is difficult enough without everyone’s Zoom feed freezing halfway through “happy” hour. You may not be able to bond over margaritas these days, but there are a few conversations you can have to make your team feel more supported—and more comfortable with communicating.

According to Forbes, the first conversation to have pertains to individual productivity. Ask your employees, quite simply, what their productivity indicators are. Since you can’t rely on popping into the office to see who is working on a project and who is beating their Snake score, knowing how your employees quantify productivity is the next-best thing. This may lead to a conversation about what you want to see in return, which is always helpful for your employees to know.

Another thing to discuss with your employees regards communication. Determining which avenues of communication are appropriate, which ones should be reserved for emergencies, and which ones are completely off the table is key. For example, you might find that most employees are comfortable texting each other while you prefer Slack or email updates. Setting that boundary ahead of time and making it “office” policy will help prevent strain down the road.

Finally, checking in with your employees about their expectations is also important. If you can discuss the sticky issue of who deals with what, whose job responsibilities overlap, and what each person is predominantly responsible for, you’ll negate a lot of stress later. Knowing exactly which of your employees specialize in specific areas is good for you, and it’s good for the team as a whole.

With these 3 discussions out of the way, you can turn your focus to more nebulous concepts, the first of which pertains to hiring. Loop your employees in and ask them how they would hire new talent during this time; what aspects would they look for, and how would they discern between candidates without being able to meet in-person? It may seem like a trivial conversation, but having it will serve to unify further your team—so it’s worth your time.

The last crucial conversation, per Forbes, is simple: Ask your employees what they would prioritize if they became CEOs tomorrow. There’s a lot of latitude for goofy responses here, but you’ll hear some really valuable—and potentially gut-wrenching—feedback you wouldn’t usually receive. It never hurts to know what your staff prioritize as idealists.

Unifying your staff can be difficult, but if you start with these conversations, you’ll be well on your way to a strong team during these trying times.