Author Rank and paying on Facebook

Paying on Facebook was a subject I followed closely in November 2012. As a business, I thought paying for more visibility was fair. But when ordinary people could also pay to get their updates out to friends, I felt Facebook risked going too far. At the same time, I saw Google+ and what I then understood as Author Rank as a very clever move by Google.

Paying on Facebook gave me a new option as a business

It was autumn, and the Weber barbecue stood outside looking a little forlorn. It would soon be used for a Thanksgiving turkey. But Facebook was what I really wanted to talk about.

The big conversation that day was about ordinary users being able to pay to get their updates out to friends. I mentioned around fifty kroner, but was unsure of the exact price.

A few months earlier, an option for businesses had appeared. I had around thirteen thousand followers on my page and could pay to reach them through the new feature.

In my experience, liking the page did not mean you saw all my updates. If a follower did not interact, they could fall out of the filter deciding what appeared. You could choose to see everything, but I thought very few did.

Paying gave me a way past that restriction. I said the feature had appeared around four to six months earlier and the options had since expanded, including to followers’ friends.

I tried it, and it started working

I had seen options starting at around twenty-five dollars and later amounts close to a thousand dollars. I thought prices had exploded. Those were the amounts and developments I described in the 2012 video.

I had spent around seven to eight hundred dollars trying it myself. Initially, I had no success. When I tried again, it started working quite well.

I did not know whether I had been too quick with my criticism the first time or Facebook had changed something in the meantime. But after the later attempts, I thought it could be a sensible option for a business with a Facebook page.

I had no problem paying to reach further, including people’s friends. That was ordinary marketing. I thought the business solution was both clever and reasonable, and had not heard much criticism of it.

Private friendships were different in my eyes

The new development was that people with an ordinary profile could also pay for visibility. At the same time, I had read users’ accounts of getting more likes but fewer comments on their status updates.

My impression was that Facebook had made it harder to reach friends and was now offering payment as the solution. That was my interpretation of what I saw and read, not a documented review of an algorithm change.

Facebook was a commercial company. It was not a government or municipality, nor a service we were entitled to. So I felt the company was perfectly within its rights to do it.

But I also thought people might feel pissed on. You had found your friends, enjoyed being with them and become used to sharing things. Then it could feel wrong suddenly having to pay fifty kroner to get a birthday greeting or an update about a birthday out.

I mentioned that of course you could still send a direct message. My criticism concerned the visibility of ordinary status updates.

A quiet feed could make people check less often

I had heard a figure of around fifteen per cent for the share of friends who actually saw an update. I presented it as something I had heard, not a measurement I had made myself.

My concern was that only a small share of users posted anything in the first place. If you had a hundred friends, perhaps four or five actually posted updates. That was an example of the pattern I felt I was seeing.

If you were then shown only a small part of their updates, there was not much left. I said my own feed consisted almost entirely of my wife and me.

I did not primarily imagine a mass exodus with everyone closing their profiles. I thought some might instead start checking Facebook less often. If you opened it repeatedly without finding anything interesting, the habit could die out.

I already knew people who had closed their profiles and others who hardly used Facebook anymore. So I felt the company needed to be careful about making a thin feed even thinner.

My understanding of Google+ and Author Rank in 2012

I had previously criticised Google+. I felt Google should start more modestly and target a niche rather than trying to reach everyone at once.

But over the past few months, I thought Google had taken strong action. I talked about what I understood as Author Rank: that a strong author profile, friends and activity on Google+ could affect the website associated with that person.

I included my own caveat that I might have misunderstood it, but at the time I felt the connection could improve search rankings. That was my understanding and assessment in 2012.

From Google’s perspective, I could see the cleverness in connecting a credible person with a website and the subjects they knew about. I thought the idea made sense as a way of thinking about credibility and ranking.

But I also thought it was a little too clever if people felt pressured to use Google+ to avoid disappearing into Google’s oblivion. I put it very crudely and described Google as having prostituted itself.

My criticism concerned the power Google, in my interpretation, could use to generate activity on its own social network. I saw it as pressure on people who depended on their websites being found.

I felt Facebook should have waited before targeting private users

In my assessment, Google had made a clever move, while Facebook’s new initiative towards private users seemed stupid. I thought Facebook should have stuck to business pages and waited.

Paying for business marketing made sense to me. But private users might experience it as a restriction on something that had previously been a natural part of being with friends on the platform. Read also E-pusher about selling and marketing online.

I could not say whether those people would then start using Google+ instead. I personally felt activity there had increased sharply over the past few months, but that was not the same as knowing what people would choose next.

It was that uncertainty and competition between the platforms I was reacting to. My final advice to Facebook was simple: Be careful. If people no longer found anything interesting when they opened it, they might stop using the service so often.