3/24/2014

Page Versus Group on Facebook

Like many independent authors, I set up a Facebook Page as a matter of course early on in my self-publishing days. It seemed the businesslike way to gather and communicate with readers and potential readers ... everyone seemed to be doing it.

I loved seeing my number of fans grow, and quite quickly my tribe grew to number in the hundreds. I began to notice something though ... on some posts, especially those I most wanted my followers to see, only a small portion of my followers ever got to see them. 

As time went by, I could see patterns developing ... posts with pictures or just text went out to 20%-30% of my followers, and posts with links in them went out to 10% or less of my followers.

Facebook offered me the option to pay to 'boost' individual posts, an option I took a number of times ... still though, it bugged me.

Facebook was asking me to pay to communicate with people who had expressed an interest in communicating with me on their (already ad-supported) social media network. If I refused to pay for the privilege, they throttled my posts back so that it reached 5%-10% of my followers.

I decided the other day that I had had enough of FB's greed and manipulation, so I pad to boost one final post ... announcing that I was migrating my communications on FB from the page to a group.



A group would seem to have significant advantages over the page for the purpose of communicating with readers and hopefully reaching new readers ... I hope so, and will report back with updates as to how things are working out.


Thanks,

Jamie

1 comment:

flask said...

there are many good choices for free websites and facebook is not a proper web presence.

facebook is about selling, but it's not about selling your work to your audience.