Businesses on Facebook: stop moaning about limits on your free ads

Businesses are getting annoyed with Facebook. That's obvious if you spend much time there – and most of us in this country do, according to Irish usage figures.

If so you’ve probably come across at least one of those posts from a business that is really, really annoyed that Facebook doesn’t circulate every one of its posts and updates to 100 per cent of its page fans and followers. Sorry folks. While I feel your pain this whine just makes me laugh (albeit mirthlessly).

The complaints go something like this. “We used to love Facebook but now we are so angry. We spent a lot of time and money developing our pages, and we’ve been getting lots of likes and lots of followers. Now Facebook limits how many people see our posts, and wants to charge us to have more of our very own followers see our posts. We are shocked. Shocked!”

Well, good morning, businesses. It seems many of you have only just now woken up to how social media works (as businesses in their own right, that is).

Maybe you haven’t followed several years of debate as to how huge social media services will make money (if they offer their service for free).

Maybe you hadn’t realised that if a service is free, then, as the saying goes (and it has been going for quite a while now), you are, of course, the product.

Those of us who are the common, average, everyday users of social media have been realising this for some time. Just like you we joined Facebook in part because it didn’t cost anything.

A lot of you are complaining that Facebook lured you with the attractions of its (free) platform and encouraged you to develop your presence. That it waited until you’d put a lot of time and effort in, then suddenly changed the game.

Well, hey: that’s just what happened to us, the ordinary users.

Soon we began to have to look at lots of ads. And then sponsored updates right bang in the middle of our own personal news feed – as if it was coming from a friend. And we noticed that when we went off and looked at, say, Amazon, we'd keep getting ads for the stuff we looked at on these third-party sites which is kind of creepy.

Get those eyeballs

As much as we might dislike it, it isn’t exactly a surprise. And I am not sure why it is for you. Ever since the dotcom boom the development template for internet companies has been to get big fast, build an audience, get those eyeballs, and then work to monetise them.

So welcome to the world of being monetised. You still get a free platform for basic use – something you don’t get elsewhere when it comes to advertising.

Yet just last week I read an opinion piece on LinkedIn from a company complaining that using the Facebook platform, with its full reach, should be free.

That makes perfect sense only if you, the businesses using Facebook, are going to give us ordinary users YOUR products for free. Why does Facebook owe you a free advertising platform? Only as much as you owe us, your customers and potential customers, free use of your products.

As for your posts not reaching all your followers – well that’s the case for ordinary users too. And may I be honest? Your fans and followers for the most part do not want to get all your posts. Your posts are, after all, a form of advertising for your brand.

They’re not quite the same as a friend’s status update or a shared cat video.

It’s your job to explain to people to change their settings to get all your updates if they prefer. Still, when most of us have at least a few hundred “friends”, we are not going to see many of them anyway. That’s how social media works.

Meanwhile, you can use sponsored ads. On Facebook they are pretty cheap and they can be surprisingly effective. Complaining that this doesn’t give you the same reach as conglomerates, who get access to more sophisticated Facebook tools, rings a bit hollow.

So please: just shut up and stop complaining that you don’t get to force even more free advertising on us. Facebook gives you a platform. On top of that it gives you opportunities to pay for unprecedented fine-tuned commercial access to us (with privacy implications that increasingly worry a lot of us, by the way).

Meanwhile forgive us ordinary Facebook users if we have just a little snigger that you, the commercial sector using Facebook, now find that you too are a form of product for an even bigger commercial entity. And don’t like it.

Welcome to our world. Walk in our shoes. Think a bit about that.