Facebook’s Changes Hit Community Orgs Where It Hurts. What To Do?

5268732048_9c693385b2_zIt’s confirmed: if you run a Facebook ‘page’ (for your community organization, for instance), Facebook’s algorithms are holding your constituents hostage until you pay up. Due to unannounced, opaque changes to what items appear in a user’s News feed, Facebook page administrators who don’t pay to upgrade are already experiencing a 75 percent or greater drop off in visibility to the folks who already clicked the big blue Like button.

For big corporations who view Facebook as just another advertising platform, this is a drop in the bucket. But for organizations and small businesses with geographically scattered bases and limited (read: nonexistent) social media budgets, this is a nightmare.

As “B. Traven” writes at Valleywag:

“From February to October 2012 our posts reached about 18 percent of our followers, on average […] If that percentage had stayed the same as our followers grew over the past two years, then each item we posted today would theoretically reach about 1,000 people.

The actual average for the second week of April? 79.

Facebook’s recent move of all pages to a pay-for-play model shouldn’t come as a surprise. There’s an old(ish) saying in social media: “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” In other words, Facebook and Google don’t charge people to upload your family photos for the same reason that ranchers don’t charge livestock for feed.

And that’s not to say that the sale of audience information is anything new; magazines and broadcast television were kept afloat and affordable for so long because they could sell advertisers the data from Nielsen boxes and demographic surveys. But Facebook’s model is a fundamentally new thing in at least two ways.
One, Facebook isn’t selling ads alongside headlines of Night Court reruns; it’s selling ad space alongside messages from your loved ones (and liked ones), folks who in turn only log on to see what you’re posting for them to see. And two, community organizations haven’t had much of a choice but to invest in Facebook’s interface over the last few years; it’s where the people are already and it’s (been) free. Plus, for communities with high poverty and low Internet access, Facebook is often the most reliable way to reach people. Almost every free phone on the market today comes with Facebook pre-installed. Facebook is easier to set up than email, and it stays connected to an individual regardless of residential address and phone number changes.
Despite collecting data from any number of page-backend dropdown menus, Facebook seems wholly uninterested in differentiating ‘organization’ pages from ‘business’ pages – they’re all feeling the same pinch. It’s hard not to see parallels between these new policies and age-old raise-the-rent gentrification tactics – except in this case the real estate isn’t limited. Facebook isn’t throttling your pageviews because Walmart needs space. It’s throttling them because it can. And while its intentions are no more or less sinister than making money, the outcome is that nonprofits, community organizations and small businesses are hit disproportionately hard. Ironically, that’s everyone who’s been using Facebook less to advertise than to build communities, the very thing that made Facebook so successful in the first place.

So: what to do?

– Pay up? The most immediate solution, and the one Facebook would like the most, is if we give in. And unfortunately, it’s worth considering: it’s hard for small shops to find extra money, but often impossible to find extra hours in a week, and that’s what the non-Facebook options involve.

– Jump ship? Twitter’s got a real reach and it doesn’t ‘sort’ content for users; the downside is that it’s not as user-friendly (its 140-character limit is its blessing and its curse). An unending string of links and in-jokes is great for journalists, but your parents (or your executive director) may not have the patience for it. Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram, three image-centric platforms, are getting bigger, but none of them have the breadth of demographics that Facebook does. And all of the above stand to dissolve as quickly as Facebook once their IPOs go public and their stockholders start demanding profits. (And no one actually uses Google+.)

– Reach out? If you know who your most popular boosters are (hopefully you have one or two on staff), you could ask them to start ‘laundering’ your posts, that is, manually sharing them out to their own friends. There’s no guarantee Facebook won’t find a way to charge for this too, but any opportunity to get your members invested in your work is a worthwhile one.

It’s likely that a lot of folks will simply wait it out; Facebook may find a way to make more money by treating small pages well and change all the rules again tomorrow. That’s fine. But as the fundamental nature of communication becomes increasingly commoditized, our strategies have to be just as agile.