Why Paid Promotions on Facebook May Actually Be Counterproductive For Your Business

I am a software professional. I have worked in several companies and with many clients during the past 20+ years in various technical capacities. I started programming with Assembly Language during my engineering days, eventually moving on to C in the mid- to late-90s, followed by C++. The next step in this logical progression was Java, and my current favorite programming language is C#. And during this time I have worked with sundry other technologies and methodologies as well, including functional programming, with languages like LISP, Scheme, and Erlang. I also dabbled in AI algorithms during the 90s, and then again in the early 2010s, much before the AI hoopla started. The reason I mention this is that I happen to know a thing or two about technology.

Lately, as an IT consultant, I find myself doing all kinds of work, one of which is managing social media accounts for several of my clients. Many of my clients, the mom-and-pop kind, have low or zero budgets, and are often not looking for paid likes; they are more interested in wanting to grow their following organically owing to budgetary constraints. On the other hand, a few of my other clients are sure that they want to grow their Facebook pages as quickly as possible; so paid likes are the way forward for them.

That gives me a pretty good perspective insofar as performance of paid vs unpaid pages is concerned. And one thing that has struck me in particular during the past few months is that once you have paid Facebook to have any kind of promotion for a particular page, they will not allow even organic posts on that page to rise up unless you pay them again. On the other hand, if you avoid paid promotions altogether, Facebook will do nothing much to stifle your posts on that page. It's a bit like Facebook telling you, if you've paid us to promote your page or post once, we're sure you can cough up more money to promote your future posts.

Of course, much of this is assumption in that I do not have much concrete evidence to back up what I say here. After all, what appears in a user's feed is a decision taken by Facebook's algorithms, the workings of which are hidden from us lesser mortals. The best I can do, therefore, is extrapolate, and the best I can state is that I only have a black box perspective on this. That said, I do know for a fact that algorithms can be tweaked and adjusted to sway one way or another to skew results in a desired direction. And being an agency of sorts, I notice a marked difference in the reach of posts on a "tainted" page (a page that has purchased some kind of paid advertisement from Facebook previously) on the one hand, and a purely organic one (an "untainted" page) on the other.

A case in point. There are two pages that I manage; let's call them Page A and Page B. Page A has around 3,000 followers, while Page B has fewer than 150 followers. Furthermore, Page A is "tainted," that is, it has had paid promotions a couple of times in the past. On the other hand, Page B has so far seen only organic growth. One post each on both the pages, during the same time more or less, resulted in the following numbers.

1. Page A (~3,000 followers / "tainted") -> Single post reached 13 people, which is < 0.5% of the page's followers
2. Page B (~150 followers / "untainted") -> Single post reached 162 people, which is > 100% of the page's followers

{{ Keep in mind that I do not talk of likes here because likes are a pretty subjective thing that depend entirely on the viewer. We only dwell on reach in this article, that is, the number of Facebook users who actually *saw* the post in their feed, regardless of whether they liked it or not. }}

And it doesn't end there, Facebook in fact rewards the "untainted" page by adding a bit of virality to it. That is, if a follower has liked the particular post in question, their friends also get to see that they liked it. Which may then prompt their friends to like the post or even the page. On the other hand, there is a "penalty" imposed on the "tainted" page, in that that it does not even reach a decent number of its own followers: it's just a tiny fraction of the total number of followers "belonging" to that page. In the case cited above, it's less than 0.5% of Page A's followers!

What does this mean for business users on Facebook? It merely means that as a business owner you should try and go for organic growth as far and for as long as you reasonably can. Enjoy the free ride that Facebook gives you, and avoid swiping your credit card until and unless you absolutely need to have more followers to demonstrate social proof.

And that's the key phrase here: social proof. You need to keep in mind that having a large number of followers on your Facebook page does not confer any special benefits on your business; the only thing it helps you with is social proof. If you think a little harder, a page with a million likes will definitely carry more (perceived) "credibility," as it were, than a similar business page but with, say, only ten thousand likes. Regardless of the quality of the product or service being offered by the actual business behind the page.

There may possibly be multiple input factors going into the algorithms that push your post in to your followers' feed, one of which may be whether your page has availed of a paid promotion earlier. (Again, I'm making an educated assumption based on my observations.) Therefore, it is entirely up to Facebook's algorithms to decide how many of your page's followers will get to see your post on their walls. And this is regardless of the size of your page's following. It would be good if you bore in mind that having a large number of followers on your page does not automatically mean that a post on that page will reach every single one of them.

To conclude, let me reiterate that a large number of followers is only good enough for social proof, and little else. More the likes that your page has, the more your perceived credibility builds up, and that's all the more likes that you can further garner. That's a good and tangible benefit to have from a branding and marketing standpoint: a large number of likes demonstrates to a neutral page viewer that yours is a "popular" brand, which may then contribute to your product's brand image, but which will not directly contribute to your product sales. (Because sales in a different ballgame altogether.) As simple as that; nothing less, nothing more. Assuming anything more than this could end up becoming perilous for your marketing or sales strategy. And that's the reason I believe that having your own opt-in email list of even a small size of one thousand subscribers is a much better sales and lead-generation strategy than "owning" a Facebook page with a million likes. After all, your opt-in email list belongs to you. But Facebook's users belong to, well, Facebook. And Facebook decides how many of them you actually get to reach. And that's why I always say that opt-in email lists are golden!

A business user on Facebook may be tempted to think that they "own" their Facebook business page, when in fact the reality is far different. Every single digital asset on Facebook, including *your* photographs, *your* posts, and yes, *your* pages too, de facto belong to Facebook. Your little corner on Facebook -- and indeed on practically every other social media platform out there -- is in fact social space that has been "generously" leased to you by the platform's owner. The entire notion of ownership on Facebook is in reality just a fancy illusion.

I leave you with this observation so that you may draw your own conclusions.