It’s mostly true. Over the past couple months I’ve watched my own organic results totally tank. It’s like a 90% drop in views per post, which results in almost no engagement, shares, likes, comments. It’s a bit frustrating since my pages have been quite active organically. I have run a few drops-in-the-bucket ads off and on.
I promoted some book release notices and a few other product release and contest notices. In the past it was fairly expensive to do so, and now it’s quite cheap. Like 500 views for a dollar cheap. Orgnically though, my “cat picture” posts are still rocking it.
example organic results for “cat picture” meme photo on facebook
As an experiment, I got to participate in a promoted post to a landing page link. For $40 there were 15,000 impressions, 110 post engagements, 400 website views, and 30 form submissions. If you ran a promoted post previous to the changes you might think that was quite reasonable, and the % are decent. I agree in principle. For any Translation related help, visit Translation Agencies UK
The problem is that if you have a product with a price point that allows for you fill your funnel at $1.10 per potential client, that’s not at all bad. Leave that ad on until the % starts to drop and then create a new landing page and give it another go-round.
If you run a fan page or other non-commercial page on Facebook then it’s pretty much done for now. All that chatter about engagement and community and what the gurus thought that social media would turn out to be is pretty much out the window when it comes to Facebook. It’s Pay-To-Play now, like with Google Adwords and Panda/Penguin.
Unless they (Zuck) realize that Mom and Pop don’t have $40/day to spend on promoting cat pictures. We can always hope.
NFL Logo Banana Chair Scandal
Quite some time ago, nearly 30 years, I worked at a parts store that used to be a regional distributor. There was an awful lot of empty shelf space back in the warehouse where we kept our backstock of retail items for the floor displays and shelving.
Back in the day, before they were marketed as “Video Game Chairs” they were called “Banana Chairs” and seemingly overnight our warehouse shelves were filled up with bright multi-colored banana chairs each wrapped in clear plastic with a thin white paper sleeve over the headrest.
The Goal Zero Estrella LED Light – when it first came out my photo was on the back of the box: Ice Climbing at Night
The manager became suspicious, having recognized the color patterns, and lifted the paper sleeve to see an NFL Logo on each of the banana chairs. NFL Logo Banana Chairs. Turns out one of the owners got involved in a partnership to fund the production and sale of these chairs. They sat there for some time until we found out that someone neglected to pay their licensing fees. The limited partners were protected from the lawsuit, but did lose their money. I bring this up merely as notice along the lines of my previous posts about Intellectual and Creative Property, that when in doubt find out up front if there are any restrictions in sharing or using images, logos, creative works, music, video, photos, etc.
“But we’re promoting your teams and your logos to your adoring fans” didn’t fly as the defense argument.
So when all is said and done, whatever you do, don’t assume that because you found it on the internet, it’s got to be fine to use it for whatever you want whenever you want. The spammer articles (the ones that are trying to sell you the “Instant Kindle Success Billionaire” programs) imply that you just go do a search on Creative Commons pics and use them. Be aware that almost all of them require definite attribution and cannot be used in a commercial context.
Save yourself the hassle. It’s really easy to buy $1 images now that are much better than most of the CC stuff I’ve seen and with much better indexing.
