Once upon a time, building a platform on Facebook was pretty easy. You made a page, people liked the page, you posted to the page, and people saw your posts. It was pretty convenient, pretty handy, pretty unmeddled with. Aaaaaaand then it was ruined.
I’ve had a Facebook author page for years, and over those years I’ve collected quite a bit of “likes”. I was pretty proud of that, because while it may not be the most accurate yardstick to measure popularity by, it was nice to know that there was a big ol’ group of people out there who were actually interested in keeping tabs on me. That meant, to me at least, that I was doing something right.
Enter Facebook’s “organic reach is overrated” scheme. If you’re not a big social media nerd like me, “organic reach” probably sounds like something you pay extra for in the produce section. Well, the pay extra part is on target, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Just to give you a quick and dirty explanation, when you “like” a page on Facebook, you expect that you’ll be seeing posts in your Facebook feed by that person or company, right? That’s why you “liked” them in the first place. But this is no longer the case. While, once upon a time simply hitting “like” would result in updates to your feed, Facebook is now requiring people and companies who own “pages” (rather than personal profiles) to pay a fee for their posts to appear in their followers news feeds. And rather than Facebook differentiating between, say, an author like me, who has a thousand “likes” and a company like Nike who has, oh, I don’t know, a million watchers, Facebook shrugged their shoulders and said “eh, we don’t care who you are. If you want to reach your audience, you have to pay to do it.” Because Facebook needs more cash after buying Oculus for two billion dollars. I mean, come on, guys! If you just spent two billion dollars on something that has nothing to do with your business model, you’d need to amp up your greed too.
That being said, I’m being forced to either a) pay for every single thing I post to my author page to be seen, which can run me from $5-100 a pop or b) get rid of my author page because I’ve yet to magically wake up in a Silicon Valley mansion, look in the mirror, and see Mark Zuckerberg’s face instead of my own. (Noooot quite sure if that’s actually a bummer, because, well, nevermind…) Up until now I’ve kept my personal Facebook page limited to close friends and relatives, but I’ve gone ahead and opened it up to my readers as well. So! If you’re a fan of my author page, or if you’re just a fan who uses Facebook, or if you just feel like following me because you’re slightly creepy and don’t know where to draw the line, the link to my personal Facebook page is below. I’d love to see your not-Zuckerberg face appear on my newsfeed. So, yes. Click and stuff.
This is it. Right here. Click this or so help me, I’ll…
Ania Ahlborn | The Blog 
I hate the changes to Facebook pages! Bah hum-bug
Thank you so much for inviting me! 🙂
I ended up closing mine when I still had plenty of readers attached to it. I reopened it for the ‘LIKE’ status only a few months back, but told my readers that if they want updates, they have to just stick to the blog.
Did it hurt me? Sure, but I’d rather they get my actual updates, and not just updates from another genre writer willing to pay to spam my readers.
It’s hard opening personal FB to readers because you run the risk of *gasp* offending some of them with a personal comment or supporting ‘lifestyles’ they may not like. I also use my FB to keep in touch with family, and I don’t need readers in on my teens shares. ^_-