Since the company went public, Facebook has been desperately trying to figure out ways to make more money. Recently, they began stealthily implementing advertisements into people’s newsfeeds, along with the usual ads that can be seen on the side of the page.
Facebook’s latest scheme to turn a profit is a feature called “promoted posts,” which allows users to pay around $7 to promote any post or page to the top of their friends’ newsfeeds. Users can also pay even more money to have their posts stay promoted for even longer.
What does this mean? Well, gone are the days in which an up-and-coming businesses or projects could gain likes and publicity just by making a Facebook page to promote themselves. Now, the pages with the most money will dominate the newsfeed, while the little guy gets buried further down the page.
Even worse, Facebook has changed their algorithm in such a way that now pages that are not promoted are reaching less people than they used to. Instead of the posts showing up in chronological order on the newsfeed, promoted posts and sponsored ads will get first priority, making it more difficult to find an audience without paying a price.
As someone who uses social media to promote multiple projects that I’m working on at any given time, I find this new feature scary. How much longer before promoting your stuff is the only way to be seen online? I understand that Facebook needs to make money somehow, but by making it difficult to be seen on Facebook without forking over some money, it has taken away part of what makes social media so appealing.
Even back in the days of MySpace the exciting thing about social media is that it made it easy for every band, and grassroots project to make their own webpage to market themselves directly to their audience. If it starts to cost money to get your name out there on these social networks, it will make it so only the company with the most money gets to be heard. Typically, a post on Facebook only reaches about 12 percent of your friends. This number is increased as more and more people like the post, and it slowly rises up on the newsfeed. You are rewarded for posting interesting things that appeal to people. This system would be ruined if any crap can make it to the top of the page for a couple of bucks.
Maybe if this system completely fails it will be the final straw that sends people over to Google+, and we all know Google doesn’t need the money as much.
Matt Grippi is a senior journalism major and the diversions editor for the Daily 49er.