A quick word about The A-Unicornist Facebook page.
Once upon a time, I thought a Facebook page would be a cool way to attract new readers to the blog and help people keep up with new posts.
Facebook has been integrating some new strategies to help monetize pages. First, for a fee, they'll promote your page so that you can get more 'likes'. I don't think there's anything wrong with that – it's just basic advertising. But then they do something sneaky. Once you've got all those 'likes', you can expect posts to engage, based on my experience managing several pages (including the page for my personal training business) roughly 10-15% of that audience. And by "engage", I mean that your posts actually show up in people's news feeds.
If you want to engage your full audience – y'know, all the people that you paid to advertise to and who decided your page was interesting enough to follow – you have to pay Facebook again. Every time I post something to the A-Unicornist page, I'm prompted with an option to promote the post. For anywhere from $5 to, well, as much as I want to spend, I can pay for my post to reach my subscribers. If that sounds a little shitty and shady, that's because it is. As a content creator, I'm basically getting charged twice: to gain an audience, then to deliver content to that audience. Case in point:
Well, I have found promoting my personal training business through Facebook to be mostly a waste of money. Google advertising in my local area was vastly more successful in getting good leads, even though it's more expensive. And since I don't actually make any money at all off of this blog, there's no way in hell that I'm actually going to pay money (twice!) to promote my content.
The best way to follow the blog remains the old-fashioned ways: bookmarks and RSS feeds.
Facebook has been integrating some new strategies to help monetize pages. First, for a fee, they'll promote your page so that you can get more 'likes'. I don't think there's anything wrong with that – it's just basic advertising. But then they do something sneaky. Once you've got all those 'likes', you can expect posts to engage, based on my experience managing several pages (including the page for my personal training business) roughly 10-15% of that audience. And by "engage", I mean that your posts actually show up in people's news feeds.
If you want to engage your full audience – y'know, all the people that you paid to advertise to and who decided your page was interesting enough to follow – you have to pay Facebook again. Every time I post something to the A-Unicornist page, I'm prompted with an option to promote the post. For anywhere from $5 to, well, as much as I want to spend, I can pay for my post to reach my subscribers. If that sounds a little shitty and shady, that's because it is. As a content creator, I'm basically getting charged twice: to gain an audience, then to deliver content to that audience. Case in point:
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| This pops up on my page, and if I click it, I'm taken here: |
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| ... where I'm prompted to pay Facebook for "reach". |
Well, I have found promoting my personal training business through Facebook to be mostly a waste of money. Google advertising in my local area was vastly more successful in getting good leads, even though it's more expensive. And since I don't actually make any money at all off of this blog, there's no way in hell that I'm actually going to pay money (twice!) to promote my content.
The best way to follow the blog remains the old-fashioned ways: bookmarks and RSS feeds.
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