Krypton Radio Newswire
Well known Star Trek actor and Gay Rights activist George Takei, recently posted on his Facebook (FB) wall, a message he had received from an unnamed fan who is also a Facebook employee. The employee wrote George to address concerns that George had been airing over what appeared to be a disruption in his fan’s abilities to see his posts. For weeks now, many have voiced their concerns over Facebook’s Promoted Posts feature, which allows FB users the ability to pay and give their posts greater reach to their page subscribers. This also seemed to coincide with what some observed as a sudden drop in the visibility of posts to those very subscribers, who now claim they have trouble getting those posts in their news feed.
On June 7th, Facebook’s marketing department released a video to talk about their Promoted Posts feature and try to explain how it all works. The 30 minute video features questions from FB users and answers from company marketing and engineers.
After the break, you can read the letter sent to George.
From George’s FB wall:
For fans following my issue with Facebook from this afternoon, I received a follow-up from a fan who actually works there, and on this very issue. To give Facebook’s side of the matter, here is his post, which I very much appreciate:
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To the esteemed Mr. George Takei, I saw your post earlier (at the top of my feed, in fact) on supposed changes to the way your posts were delivered to fans. I work at FB and even work on the product you describe, and I wanted to drop a note to say that we’ve changed NOTHING about the way page posts are delivered to fans. I still see your posts in my feed all the time (keep ‘em coming
. The main point of confusion we’ve seen is that pages don’t realize that their posts were never reaching 100% of fans. If you go to your page insights, you’ll see this has always been the case.
And it makes sense if you stop and think about it: there is just no way to see all of the stuff happening on FB in your feed. Personally, I have over 700 friends and have probably fanned 1000s of pages, there is no way I can see all of their posts in my feed everyday. Fortunately, FB does a pretty good job ranking content based on the people and pages I interact with the most. So naturally, George Takei and Taco Bell are usually at the top of my feed
All Promoted Page Posts does is offer an easy way for page admins to pay to promote a post using FB ads using functionality that already existed. A lot of businesses use posts to promote sales, concerts, etc and its an easy way to get more distribution and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from pages about the product.
We actually did a webinar last week explaining a bunch of this so if you can bear to watch (unfortunately i don’t have your camera presence), check it out here:http://livestre.am/3XeS0
