Friday, October 12, 2012

Facebook now charging for personal page posts

I have to say, I was quite shocked when Facebook decided that in order to reach a large amount of fans on your business page, you now have to pay to reach out to the fans that you tried so hard to collect in the first place assuming that you would be able to reach them easily with your business page. But now Facebook is offering this for your personal page as well. They have a button now on your post that says "promote" it then wants you to pay $7 in order to make your post "important news" on your friends newsfeeds.

This seems like the beginning of Facebook slowly becoming a paid site which will ruin the while concept of Facebook completely.

I'm wondering what the push is for these new methods of making Facebook users pay? Are the billions of dollars Facebook is making off advertisers not enough? Are they just getting greedy? Or are advertisers backing out because, in my opinion at least, Facebook advertising is less effective than google advertising.

I understand hitting up the advertisers and small businesses for cash, but hitting up the typical consumer Facebook user is just going overboard. What is going to be paid next? Does this mean that my posts aren't going to be seen by as many of my friends if I don't pay?

The big question is, what do I really get out of paying the $7 to promote something to "important news" on my personal page. Lets say I want people to know about my small business or my event, am I really going to make $7 worth of profit from advertising to under 1500 friends? Not necessarily. Maybe if I was a medium sized business with a personal page but I'd say the majority of people are not.

Now I'm just wondering what the next social media site that's going to be coming up if Facebook wants to keep hitting us up for money, I know everyone will be gone soon enough. Maybe google plus? I'm not a fan of their layout but I'm also not a fan if paying for posts!