Meteo Xavier Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 (edited) I figured this was relevant enough to post in Community, since a huge majority of us post our music links and others to Facebook. I'm an administrator for several pages on Facebook and I've been noticing for the last couple weeks in analytics that posts with links to media, like pictures, websites, Youtube, Soundcloud, etc. have been receiving markedly low numbers in just how many people actually saw the post - whereas posts with nothing but paragraphs of text are receiving the correct or even considerably higher percentages of viewing. It is well known, by now, that Facebook has rigged their posting system so that unsponsored posts only get posted on 10-15% of your fanbase's walls, with slightly higher percentages given how much feedback you receive from your fanbase (and it obviously factors in that some people just don't see your post from 10 hours ago with everyone else's jamming their walls too). But some of the numbers I've been seeing lately have been DRASTICALLY reduced from even that bullshit. As such, I had a track released on SNESology yesterday (I won't post it here because I did elsewhere, and I don't want to look like I'm just ranting to get more views on it) and I even donated a bit of money to the SNESology Facebook page to make it a sponsored post, which was supposed to get me about 3000-7000 views for what I paid. The post went out and didn't even say it was sponsored! The feedback was certainly not what I would reasonably expect if 3000-7000 people saw it. I posted it, unsponsored, on my own page (which has a paltry 181 fans on it) and only 5 people saw it. 5 damn people out of 181. That's not even 3%. My best guess is Facebook changed their algorithms and such around to cut down on stupid musicians spamming their links out anywhere and everywhere, but in their classic lack of infinite wisdom, they just made it 3x harder for small musicians who can't afford $300 ad campaigns for every track they want to post to get any attention whatsoever. Has anyone else seen or read anything on this lately? I wanted to look it up, but I haven't seen anything on it and I'm not sure how I would even search that in Google. If you haven't, word of warning, your media posts may start seeing much smaller traffic than you were accustomed to. Edit: I just now saw the sponsored thing on it, which is good but I swear it wasn't on there before. Edited October 19, 2013 by Meteo Xavier Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brandon Strader Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 I did notice that text posts get the views. Only thing I can think to work around that is to post a youtube or similar link as a text link, not an attachment, if you know what I mean. But the presentation isn't as nice that way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 Yep I've noticed this as well. Seems like many kinds of shared links are not doing well. Not sure what the algorithm is though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meteo Xavier Posted October 19, 2013 Author Share Posted October 19, 2013 Only thing I can think to work around that is to post a youtube or similar link as a text link, not an attachment, if you know what I mean. Hey now, that's not a bad idea. It might be that the attachment part itself is whats dragging it down. Have you tried that on your page to see if that works? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkeSword Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 I don't think it's a crackdown on spam at all, just Facebook trying to monetize their service more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meteo Xavier Posted October 19, 2013 Author Share Posted October 19, 2013 That's why I put a question mark in there. I almost find it difficult to think Facebook would pull a stunt like that when they're already one of the most used and most advertised websites on Earth, but then again, their actual commitment to users has always been sketchy at best. They have services for increasing page strength that have been broken for months, and they're in no hurry to fix it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrett Williamson Posted October 19, 2013 Share Posted October 19, 2013 so I'm not the only one? I've been noticing that on my pages as well, and I thought I was just unlucky and nobody gave a crap about YouTube videos, which surprises me because it seems that would be more attractive than stupid text. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DusK Posted October 20, 2013 Share Posted October 20, 2013 I haven't noticed any drops, but I haven't been really paying attention. I do know now, though, that YouTube vids I post to Facebook end up with around 25 views after a day. 106 "likes" on my own page. Freakin' Facebook, man. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meteo Xavier Posted October 21, 2013 Author Share Posted October 21, 2013 Strange update - this morning I found a notice for my music page saying that my SNESology post, which now tops off at a whopping 19 people actually seeing it, got more views than 95% of my other posts on that page and that I should consider sponsoring it to get further notice. Umm, what? The post I made before that got 78 people seeing it, more than 4x the coverage. I'm thinking now maybe its not something Facebook is doing intentionally, maybe something's really screwy with their mathworks and programming causing bugs and such. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Master Mi Posted October 21, 2013 Share Posted October 21, 2013 I noticed this very well. About 2 years before the postings seemed to have been stored a little bit for all those Facebook friends who didn't get a chance to see it right in the time you were posting it. So they got to see it later on and they also "liked" postings more than today. On the one hand it will be of course a monetarization attempt of facebook. On the other hand many people in these days post pretty important stuff about the corruption and the big crimes of their own governments, politicians, bad banks and really dangerous profit-over-life companies. Leaders of the world with bad intentions fear such an awareness of the people and facebook just like the internet are media that can spread those informations very fast. So I guess they made some kind of filter for informations where much important stuff goes through unseen. The weekend before thousands of people from the tea party movement united via facebook to organize a shutdown of the government in Washington (guess it were about 500000 people). It was such a great movement, that somebody had shut down their facebook page. They made a new page though - but with that you can see another possible purpose of this facebook topic. Informations can cause revolutions (which are necessary from time to time) which "mighty" people/tyrants may fear. If you post something you want others to see (or to listen to), leave it for a while (a month or so) without posting anything new in this time. Good friends, interested people and subscribers will take a look at your facebook page from time to time. Patience is the mother of reaction (or sumthin' like that). ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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