Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Oh Facebook! My Facebook!

Well, hell's bells.

Crap.

I mean, it was just getting safe to come right out in public and opine that maybe a certain large retail web site isn't gonna to punch us authors in the face and take our kids' lunch money for sport, what after all the uber-sales authors got in the middle of what was essentially a contract negotiation between them and a major publisher, which finally ended after the giant retailer embarrassed the snot out of the other side by happily coming to terms with someone else, which made the other publisher whimper up to the table and the mega-sales authors run a full-page ad asking the DoJ for--um, something--and everybody finally SHUT UP about it and then finally the whole angry, disastrous mess came to an end just like this overly long run-on sentence is doing.

Now it's Facebook's turn to poke the bear, apparently.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, the big evil giant of a bad-man corporation is out to punch entrepreneurs in the face and take our kids' lunch money for sport (sound familiar?).  Or, at least, take our advertising money for, um, revenue.

Yes, Facebook!  My Facebook has announced that commercial operations have to pay to play, now.  Or will, then, in the near future, anyway.  Which means, I assume (they haven't, near as I can tell, released a description of their actual algorithm yet, nor are they likely to), that people are far less likely to see what I put on my author FB page unless I pay to Boost the post, in which case they're actually more likely to see it.  Which is, um, how advertising is supposed to work, by the way.

Which, I think, ain't all that bad of a thing.

Look, here's how I see it.  If you want to see what's on my author page, go look.  Please; I'd love for more people to do that.  In fact, I'm about to start putting even more stuff up there, considering the tremendous success I had through NaNoWriMo with activity.  To tell the truth, I'm'a gonna start havin' some fun. But that said, if you don't want to see what's on my author page, then you must be insane you shouldn't have it stuck in your timeline.  Shouldn't, that is, unless you've identified yourself as someone who likes the kind of stuff that's on my author page, and I've paid Facebook to run a targeted ad in the hopes of getting your attention. Which is, again I say, how advertising is supposed to work.

Yes, I'm an author--an authorpreneur, as I've been referring to myself since--well, quite some time ago.  I'm also a Facebook user, though, and to be perfectly honest, the number of times I interact with authorly stuff  on FB is pretty minimal.  Oh, I've bought a couple of books thanks to interactions on FB, but usually I'm on there just trying to convince my friends of the opposite political persuasion that I'm right and they're wrong, or posting pretty little pictures of my Chihuahua, or stuff like that. 

And the thing is, I bet you are, too.

The part of FB's message that is being forgotten, or ignored, by so many folks right now is that "Facebook’s paid-advertising options have become more effective recently," a claim that I, personally, have seen.  My Thanksgiving promotion was wildly successful, in fact, in large part thanks to a simple and fairly cheap Facebook ad. 

A friend of mine wrote (in a massively-popular Facebook post about, of all things, Facebook's new policy) something to the effect of "I'm sure, if you complain loudly enough, Facebook will refund every penny you've ever paid for your free advertising."  Zing.  That's a tad snarky, perhaps, but the core is something I agree with wholeheartedly.  Facebook created for us a social media platform, somewhere we could go for free and post pictures of weddings and weedings and kittens and puppies and everything in between.  Yay, them!  That some were able to tap into it for a free advertising platform is good for them, but there's no reason to expect the practice to continue.

Anyway, there's an awful lot of opinion flowing around out there.  Assuming you made it this far, then you've now read mine.  Feel free to share yours in the comments; I love hearing from you! 


Peace,

- TOSK

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