And to comment on the paid services, are people being contacted by Facebook to receive these services via email or some other way? I don’t think I’ve seen anything to help me be a “better” promoter.

And we are seeing more corporate sponsored stories in the news feeds (check the influx of negative comments on the business pages after you see one – total backfire)

I “actually manage” a dozen large Facebook pages and dozens of medium + small ones, but  simply having a large audience base and seeing the metrics + the advertising pitch Facebook throws at you isn’t some right of passage that guarantees that you fully understand the situation so I’m not sure what flaunting that about does to assist the situation.

To say “you have to pay money for everyone to see all your posts/content” is not accurate. It’s not. This is what I take issue with. Not the inherent conflict of interest in the way Facebook games things or the disingenuous way in which they are essentially manipulating people into spending loads of dollars on promoted content.

Not sure why the sarcastic tone, etc. Apologies to whomever if my initial post came across the wrong way, I can see how it may have though it was posted out of concern. Every week someone is in a panic in my FB feed talking about how Facebook is “blocking all their posts unless they pay money!” and it needs to be explained in proper detail to them.

Full stop.

You. Are. Not. Right. You are incorrect. As in wrong. Says me, and every other person in this thread who actually manages a Facebook page. Facebook can do whatever the hell they want–it’s free ice cream, after all–but kindly don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.

I blogged this on 2012-06-06 after helping the web master of a non-profit research lab conduct empirical tests.  Your assumption that you understand how it works may be no more reliable than your assumption that I haven’t done research.

Facebook changed the way posts propagate after their IPO so that they could implement a “pay to play” policy.  This is certainly within their rights as a free service, but it’s what’s happening, and your claims that it’s not happening are akin to claiming gravity doesn’t work – you’re contradicting observable realities.

On the other hand, as the admin of a Facebook Page, this sucks.

We’ve talked about the inherent conflict of interest in the model anyway, and I’d go further in saying that there’s a conflict of interest in Facebook actually explaining more clearly/accurately how this all works, which they have yet to properly do.

I’m not here to argue, I really dislike Facebook and look forward to its eventual, slow demise, and it’s questionable business models + lack of accountability on the security/privacy front along with it.

We’ve been running our FB page for two years and we understand Edgerank. FB quietly removed the ‘update’ feature (aka free group messaging) and then brought in ‘promoted posts’ and ‘sponsored stories’ while drastically reducing the reach of unpaid-for posts.

It’s a classic bait-and-switch.

We run a page of 500,000+ fans/likes, and have watched the reach stats drop over time – no matter how viral the content – to the point where our page has become functionally useless, posts now reaching barely 1000 people – unless we pay FB to promote them, of course…

Yes, that’s 1 in 500, or 0.2%.

PS. We paid a lot of money in FB ads to grow that page. Never again.

Facebook has been gradually doing this filtering for a while — it’s been quite a while since most users have actually been seeing 100% of their feeds due to the simple volume of traffic Facebook gets, and how spammy many users’ news feeds would be. There’s a bunch of algorithmic massaging to try and surface what’s most relevant to you in your feed, but the controls aren’t directly accessible.

What Facebook’s done now is monetized that filter’s throttle knob.

No need to get nasty though.

This from the person who started out with…

This is an irresponsible, misleading piece.

You’ve got a real whiny bully vibe building up there.

No need to get nasty though. It IS a confusing topic.

As I’ve said in my reply to Mr. Holiday, I do agree with the notion that there are some serious conflict of interest issues here, but a lot of the panic that’s been going on for months is based on misinterpretation and a lot of people are losing their hat over a complete misconception of how it all works.

The truth is that FB has limited the propagation of posts and wants to charge for that formerly free service – it’s a classic “bait and switch” move.  Hey, come in here, non-profit do-gooder!  We’ll give you free advertising!  Oh, but now we’re changing our terms of service to charge you slightly less than what it would cost to reprint all the materials you sent out with “like us on facebook” on them.