Facebook…

I used to be a real fan of facebook. Really..i was.

I remember first being told about it by a friend and he was explaining how his sister in America used it a lot and it was this new big thing. I remember logging on (on dial up..which takes some patience!) and not being able to understand why it would ever be useful. I think i logged on, got an account and then promptly forgot about it…

Then dawned the age of the iphone and for me this opened up a whole world of possible surfing opportunities and in a moment of mild interest i loaded the facebook app from itunes and then facebook became part of my daily catching up, finding friends from years ago, seeing kids grow up and change, finding out news and of course that delightful past time of rolling your eyes at how wonderful everybody’s day, holiday, family, car, weekend etc are…yeah yeah don’t go on there after you have had a wet week camping in Devon you are going to depress the C**P out of yourself flicking through the 200 pictures posted by someone you vaguely know of all their inclusive, sun soaked, smiley, happy, sangria holiday. 😉

Anyhoo…Recently i added a business type page for my photography and it has been amazing for referrals and a quick way of communicating with my clients.

Then things started to change and i heard scary stories about photos loaded to FB being the property of FB, entire pages just disappearing without a mention. More recently there seems to be much more control over what you actually see in your news feed. The OH and i have had many conversations along the lines of..

‘hey did you see X’s photos of his kids?’ –

‘er…no’ and then i discover that, that person’s updates are not featuring in my newsfeed AT ALL despite being a friend of mine and you know a proper friend not someone who you vaguely know. 😉

This has been happening more and more. I see less of actual updates and more and more of company promotion.

Now it appears that if FB think you are newsworthy enough then you will feature in newsfeeds……nice… so companies that rely on reaching their clients via fb are now finding that they are only reaching (in some cases) as little as 10% of their followers because fb is not deeming their news worthy enough to go into all their followers newsfeed.

The newest development? The option to ‘promote’ your posts which means that you can pay for your posts to be in other people’s newsfeeds. Click on it and facebook will cheerfully ask you for your paypal details and off you go. *shakes head*  you would think that promoted posts would only be from people that you are friends with or pages you like. Not so…i keep getting promoted posts from facebook accounts that i have never had anything to do with..

I remember reading something about  Mark Zuckerberg saying facebook would always be free…hmmmm..guess that changes when you have shareholders to satisfy now eh?

twitter anyone?

🙂