So I’ve been worried for a long time that I have been posting too much about my writing on Facebook. The business page has very little reach, because content is no longer shared organically. The profile page is better for personal interactions than promotion, and it’s dodgy using it for purposes that could be read as promotional; sometimes people will (understandably, I think) feel taken for granted. I have been looking for a permanent solution.
“Your First 1,000 Copies,” a well-researched book by Tim Grahl made a convincing case for using an email mailing list instead of social media because it assures opt-in from readers who want regular content (some of which will be of a promotional nature).
I’ve started a mailing list but, since Facebook is currently my largest concentration of friends and readers, I wanted to let them know and the News Feed is not a reliable way to do so. (What percentage of your friends actually see what you post on Facebook, and what percentage of them are the friends interested in that particular content?) Nor did I want to draft a 20 character ad which would be a sales pitch unable to communicate why I am making the transition and what I hope it will accomplish for my readers.
As a result, I’ve been sending personally addressed messages to people whom I thought would be interested, in a more-or-less alphabetical order, a letter or so per day (I’ve made it up to ‘E’) before getting my message sending privileges blocked for “sending too many messages.” I subsequently was also blocked from posting content to either my business page or my profile, which did not involve any of the captcha requests or notifications one usually gets when an account is hijacked. (Curiously enough, I am still allowed to share content, which is what I’m going to do with this blog post.)
The block evidently lasts 30 days (based on what I can find online, not that the intentionally vague Facebook’s Help Forums offer any guidance).
And therein lies the irony:
I could post links and excerpts from my books on my profile every hour of every day without any reprisal.
I could, if I wanted, send all 1,124 of you an invitation to play some silly game at the click of a button.
However, because I messaged a carefully selected group of maybe 150 of you in one day about opting on to an email list, the most important features of my account have been suspended for they-won’t-tell-me-how-long.
This isn’t so much about spamming as it is about my ability to take content offsite and giving readers and friends an incentive to get their information somewhere other than Facebook. Messages are tightly (but vaguely) regulated because, tellingly, they are one the last features on Facebook free from advertising.
I’m not annoyed; Facebook is a business and they’re protecting their ability to profit from your exposure to advertisers. They’re protecting their profit, and that’s what businesses do. You might as well be annoyed at a lion for eating a wildebeest.
I am inconvenienced, however. I’ll try to reach out people about the mailing list by email, as I am able. When/if my posting privileges are restored, I may discuss the transition more on Facebook, because that is still where my readers are. But I’m kind of caught between a rock and a hard place here. Facebook initially presented fan and business pages as a way of building brands and marketing through their platform, but they have incrementally weakened that feature for anyone who doesn’t have a much larger budget than I do. Perhaps if I had taken this step a year or two ago, I could have avoided these problems.
I’ll talk about the list again at a later date, and my main purpose in writing this post was not promotional so much as to lay out the unique problems I’ve encountered using Facebook as a business platform, even when following their own best practices and recommendations. You simply can’t do much with them as a business unless you have a massive budget, and even then all you can do is advertise yourself to saturation and pray that something goes viral.
UPDATE: Further trial-and-error has demonstrated that I can, actually, still post and message on Facebook, but that I cannot link to the mailing list via any direct link or redirect. This is significant in that it makes their response to my messaging yesterday seem less disproportionately severe for what I was doing. However, it still does not solve my fundamental problem: difficulty communicating with my readers on Facebook why I am moving away from Facebook.
