Can Facebook Hold Your Fan Page Hostage? Fallout from the IPO Debacle & How It Affects YOU

 

One of the reasons WANA methods are so powerful is that WANA focuses on people and relationships, not technology. Here’s the thing. To say the Internet changes a lot is like saying that Lady GaGa is a tad eccentric. Everything changes so quickly we can’t keep up. But you know what never changes?

People.

This is why we can still take a Shakespeare play, King Lear, set it on a farm in modern times and call it A Thousand Acres and it wins Academy Awards. Audiences can still relate. Humans are timeless. Thus, in a world where the technology changes faster than most of us can keep up, the only sure bet is people. Social platforms come and go, but humans remain.

So why am I bringing this up?

Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

We must be really careful how much power we give to any social platform. This is one of the reasons I am strongly against platforms that rely heavily on sheer numbers. It takes time and energy to build a following of 20,000 or 40,000 or even 100,000. Not only does it take time, but if something happens?

KABLOOEY!!!!

I’ve never been a huge fan of Facebook. I mean, I like it and I participate, but even though I wrote about how to build a fan page, I dragged my feet building one of my own. I blame it on Navy training. My father was in military intelligence and so I tend to be a bit paranoid. I won’t sit with my back to a room, I don’t use my real name for store discount cards, and I don’t keep all my social media eggs in one basket.

I’m not willing to give anyone that much power over my platform.

Yes, I am a tad Orwellian. Sure they are using my Kroger card to track my purchases to send me coupons. Like I buy THAT story. Probably collecting my information so they can sell it to the CIA in case they wanted to kidnap me and put probes in my brain to read my thoughts.

I’ll stop.

Anyway, the only reason there is a MyWANA fan page is that one of my WANA peeps who ROCKS Facebook, offered to build it.

That is the WANA way…the whole chipping in thing. It is seriously awesome. Thank you Lisa Hall-Wilson! She is our Facebook expert at WANA International.

So What is the Problem with Fan Pages?

Fan pages are dangerous when we rely too much on the sheer volume of numbers. Anything that relies on numbers already has a depressing ROI (Return on Investment {about 3-5%}). It is this depressing ROI that causes people to need higher numbers. 

Think, mass mailings.

But there is another problem. As I said a second ago, building a fan page with these mega numbers takes time, energy and investment, but, if we aren’t careful, it makes us vulnerable.

For those of you who have fan page, I don’t know if you have noticed that there is a % sign that now appears under each of your posts showing how many of your fans you reached.

To quote Cinda Baxter of the 3/50 Project:

The number shown doesn’t represent the number of your fans online at the moment; it’s the abysmally small number Facebook bothered to publish in newsfeeds.

Yeah. You read that correctly. Most of your fans don’t receive your posts. At all. In any way, shape, or form. Facebook is only sharing them with fans who repeatedly return to your page, post on your page, comment on your page, or otherwise engage on your page.

But after these % signs appeared, another button magically appeared as well, Promote. Yes, we now have to pay Facebook to reach the rest of our fans. Not to advertise, but to reach people who are already fans. Oh, and it isn’t as if this is a small number. When Cinda Baxter crunched the numbers, she calculated that every post, to reach her existing fan base that she’d built for the 3/50 Project, would be about $500 a post.

I’d actually received a phone call from an incensed fan page owner (a fellow writer) over the weekend who calculated she’d have to ante up $300 per post if she wanted to reach her fans.

What Happened?

Well, this is the problem with a private company going public. The same thing happened with MySpace. One day it was a lot of fun, and the next day we couldn’t go to a friend’s page without risking a computer crash from all the ads.

The second a company goes public, then revenue and shareholders start taking precedence. Facebook’s bloated IPO (Initial Public Offering) put them in a bind.

“How can we measure up to the shareholders’ expectations? We need to make money.”

To quote Steve Tobak of CBS Money Watch:

Even at yesterday’s close of $25.87, with a corresponding valuation of $55 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 66, Facebook’s stock is still overpriced. If this doesn’t wake up investors — institutional and retail — to the perils and pitfalls of an over-hyped tech company, whether the stock trades on a private exchange like SecondMarket or going public on the Nasdaq, I don’t know what will. 

Facebook is being called the dot.com bubble 2.0 and now it’s busting…BIG TIME. FB needs to make money in a bad way, and, sorry fan page owners, you are the cash cow. Facebook knows that you’ve put a lot into those fan pages and they are hoping that, by holding your numbers hostage, they can squeeze out some moooooo-lah.

Ba da bump *snare*. Yes, folks, I’m here all week. Drinks half price after five.

This is one of the reasons that focusing on people is paramount in the Digital Age. See, the mega companies like Coca Cola or Victoria’s Secrets won’t bat an eyelash at dropping that kind of cash to post. They probably spend that on stamps. Advertising has been making a shift to social media for the past decade anyway. The big companies can just take their print budget and pay Facebook.

But what about the little guy?

What about the author who relies on the fan page to connect with her audience? To let fans know about book releases and giveaways and other important events? What about the musicians? The artists? The photographers? What about all the creative professionals who rely on Facebook to help their businesses? Most of us don’t have $300 or $500 to shell out per post. Heck, as much as I post on social media, I’ve already spent the GNP of Jamaica just today.

Facebook was a way that we, the little guy, had to level the playing field. We didn’t need a big ad budget like Target or Slim Jim. We could just invest good old-fashioned sweat equity and run with the big boys.

Facebook Can Be Beaten at Their Own Game

Actually, from what I see of my numbers, this whole “charge you to reach your own fans” can be beaten. What Facebook is doing is basically making people pay to advertise. Yet, a fan page done properly, the WANA way, is a relationship. Remember, what Cinda said, Facebook is only sharing them with fans who repeatedly return to your page, post on your page, comment on your page, or otherwise engage on your page.

Well, when you build a fan page using WANA methods, your fans will be doing all of those things. Lisa Hall-Wilson teaches Facebook the WANA way, so I recommend her class Own Your Own Stage: Using Facebook to build Your Author/Artist Brand.

Next week we will talk about some practical ways that WANA can help you keep your fan page connecting to your fans. In the meantime, I recommend checking out Cinda Baxter’s blog, Facebook Fans Aren’t Seeing Your Posts and How to Fix It. Cinda was kind enough to send her post to me and she has some suggestions to help navigate this new digital roadblock.

The Up Side and the Down Side

Remember, all of these social sites have pluses and minuses. The better the social site, the better the odds it will become a publicly traded company, and that’s when the bottom line and profit margins take center stage. Facebook is still awesome. Face it, it has almost like a billion members. Sheer volume makes it a worthwhile place to hang.

But we must be ever vigilant and guard our platforms. If we get lazy, it is too easy for our platform to be held hostage. People who’ve relied heavily on automation and spam and form letters are going to be the first to feel the hurt, and frankly, I am not too upset about that.

Make No Mistake, We Will Pay for Our Platform

We will either pay with money, or with our time and attention. But when we pay with money, the ROI is dismal and we have a lot less flexibility to move if we no longer like the site. When we invest in relationships, it still costs, but our platforms will remain in tact and will be more resilient to change. And, frankly, investing in people is a lot more fun and rewarding anyway.

So next week some tactics to help, but if you are just fed up with Facebook, hop on over to the new social site for creatives WANATribe. Here is an invitation. I built it and so I reign supreme and do not tolerate spam, ads, form-letters, trolls or bots. Our goal is to recreate the salons of Paris, a digital world where creatives can some together and network, make friends, collaborate, or just share Jell-O shot recipes.

The cool part is that you can customize your own page, kind of like MySpace before it went crazy, so it allows us to be a little more artsy (and there is no friend limit). Also, everywhere you turn you will meet creative people just like you. Hope to see you there! Also remember the WANA International kick-off party will be Friday at #WANAParty and we will be giving away all kinds of cool prizes.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Facebook should charge? Are they getting too greedy? Have they hurt your fan page following? Do you think Facebook has hurt their brand with these changes? Do you think Facebook going public is the beginning of the end? Or do you think they are too big to be adversely affected? Come on! We can all play armchair economist!

I love hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of June, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. If you leave a comment, and link back to my blog, and mention my book We Are Not Alone in your blog…you get your name in the hat THREE times. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.

I will pick a winner every week for a critique of your first five pages. At the end of June I will pick a winner for the grand prize. A free critique from me on the first 15 pages of your novel. Good luck!

I also hope you pick up copies of my best-selling books We Are Not Alone–The Writer’s Guide to Social Media and Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer . And both are recommended by the hottest agents and biggest authors in the biz. My methods teach you how to make building your author platform FUN. Build a platform and still have time left to write great books.