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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Thursday, January 31, 2019

Choking on the Throttle

Facebook's profits have soared, even amidst multiple severe scandals, and as a page admin, I can tell you why. Here is an image I took for my last blog post of my analytics by month.

Last October, right around mid-month, FB did their largest content throttling to date. You can see my number start to tank in October and go WAY down after that. The algorithm, which already ensured that less than 1% of the people following a page would ever see a given post that page published, got even more conservative. My personal numbers dropped by over 90%.

Take a moment to think about that. I went from 10k hits per day to maybe 1000. 90% *more* people who are on my page never see a link that it is still entirely their decision to click on or not.

Facebook billed this change to rank and file users as a wonderful "See more of your friends and family" change that they were GIFTING people. (As if people didn't want to see the content they signed up to see.) However, three things betray their true motives:

1- Content within the FB ecosystem is more popular than ever. Without my page growing by more than a few thousand, I have seen posts get two, three, even more times the number of likes and comments that they used to. That means the macros and posts are more common on your timeline than before. What is being throttled is links to outside URLs. Basically any page (like mine) that is not working for FB's benefit, but trying to put on a little show to get a few more eyeballs for their blog/website/Etsy/whatever, has been reduced by 9/10ths. This is part of the reason you see infographics now instead of links to articles.

2- Behind the scenes, page admins have been subjected to a DELUGE of ads trying to get us to advertise, including new "Messenger Ads" (that look like someone in our PMs) and even more intense email and timeline saturation.

3- People are seeing more sponsored content than ever before. Not less. More. They aren't actually GETTING more of their friends and family.

Social media is vital to the business models of a lot of independent artists and entertainers, and FB has basically sauntered through and said "That's a nice outreach you have there. It'd be a shame if something....HAPPENED to it." And yes, FB sales are up because some of us are desperate to get back the reach we once had. But the money doesn't pay for nearly enough outreach and most small pages I know are looking for other ways to promote themselves.

Does FB have a “right" to do this? Of course. I'm not saying they don't. (I have used their ad services myself when I was working too much on side gigs and had more money than time to write.) When it comes to social media, WE are the product being sold, and there's a reason sites like FB are "free." It doesn't make it less shitty for those of us whose incomes rely on a landscape that changed SO dramatically overnight (and with the intention of fleecing us for money).

This is why one of the best things you can do is support pages you like by following them on other social media, engaging with their posts (likes, upvotes, etc) to help them with the FB algorithm, and make a note to go to any webpage or something they're promoting. Anything you can to help them against FB.

I am telling you all this because I'm going to keep trying to find workarounds to social media, as it is the way I find donors and patrons and am able to be a working writer. I won't just be trying other sites but ways to make FB (which, unfortunately, is still numerically the only game in town) work. Some of this may affect my ability to post as frequently here, as it has in the past.

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