Facebook – You are Dead to Me Now
Facebook has been a good place for my work in weight loss, health, and social media topics. I know not many others feel that way or get results, but in my case, I have been getting affiliate sales, coaching work, and book sales from Facebook.
I do not spend money on Facebook, but I do spend time. I’ve been working various strategies for a few years now, and they have sent me regular monthly income. Here’s how Facebook worked for me.
Facebook Pages
I have about 15 Facebook pages is various niches. All of my pages have keyword rich, evergreen posts. People find that work by searching my topics in Facebook. When they get to my pages, they find posts of interest with affiliate links. They also find my books, and coaching offers for various topics. Aside from posting on occasion and answering messages, I do not do much on my pages and money and leads come in.
Facebook Groups
I do not run any groups at Facebook, but I belong to almost 800 of them. These groups are in my niches. I post my offers in groups or interesting information on topic and get leads in that way.
My Facebook Feed
My feed is the last place I work, but it does give results. My most active groups appear in my feed and I can enter in to discussions. Many of my connections on Facebook are obese people trying to change, or others in my niches and I post encouragement where I can. I have gotten short -term coaching work in this way – normally to review the way people eat and suggest better alternatives for health.
All of that has action changed for the worse in the last few months.
Facebook has changed their algorithms so that most of what I see now is not people and groups, but is instead advertising, short videos, and news from large companies. Until recently I saw very little of this and blocked it as I did see it.
Most recently, I am seeing only advertising and then if I scroll my feed for a few screens – Facebook pops up with a notice that now says I have seen all there is to see and “Here are the top posts from Facebook.” With 1400 “fb friends” and 770 groups – I know much of that action is being screened out for this new fb trick.
All of this new “Top Post” action is from the Big Companies again. I have gone through this post flow that Facebook gives me and blocked at least 50 companies in the last few days.
At the same time – searches are no longer finding my pages. My most active groups no longer appear in my feed at all. I have about 5 of them I am in daily and now I have to search them out.
My job is to reach obese people and others in niche categories who are seeking to change and need help.
If I cannot find them – they cannot find me. Few people are as aggressive as I am in trying to keep a clean feed. So all of them are now being fed corporate media that will not help them and not finding my work which can help them.
I am not alone in with this problem. It the last few weeks – when I get to my groups – many others are posting the same thing I am “What is all this garbage on my feed now?”
A few anecdotes:
- One of my best social media groups is very large and grows continually. It is run by a very positive guy and has several great admins. I go there for inspiration, tips, and positivity. Today the pinned post is a call for help and stats about how traffic has died in the last 6 weeks.
- One of my top author friends posted that she had 50K in visits to her page in December 2017 and 5K in February 2018. She mentioned that December is normally a slow month due to the holiday and spring months should be in the 150K visit range.
- A “natural” health and remedies group I like is completely gone now – it is no longer in the list of groups I am in and I cannot find it by search.
Thanks to this problem, all the money I make and all the connections I make on Facebook have tanked – and tanked badly.
This is one of the many reasons I am in a panic about money and my financial situation is dire. The best think I can do is to just keep working and posting where ever I find a place to do it.
How about you?
- Do you still use Facebook?
- Have you seen this type of change for the worse?
- Do you have any good ideas about what to do next?
If you think this is bad - what happened today on Twitter is even worse.
My life changed when I lost "half my size" at the age of 50. Anyone can do this if I did. Ask me for help, and I will help you.
Yes I have found exactly the same and now that Facebook has banned Crypto it has little relevance for me. I get all the corporate crap and not enough from my friends. Facebook will realise too late after they lose people who will never come back. MySpace Déjà vu.
RIP Facebook.
This is a very perplexing time indeed. The blocking of cnn/fox/oprah/bbc etc has seemed to help for me - but most people will never do that - so all they will see over there now is fake news.
People should use Kryptonia Tasks to drive people to their social media content. I have been doing this to Twitter and now see more activities on my tweets.
I've seen that and I will follow your lead - great idea.
Twitter want to ban crypto too!
So good, that I had to Resteem! Bye Bye FB
Thank you so much. I really appreciate your help and support. This is a hard day in social media for me and steemit is always a bright spot.
I dont use Facebook other than to for cryptocurrency bounty.
Your situation is not unfamiliar. I heard many individuals and small companies moved to the point of ruin just through a change an algorithm. This is the power that Facebook has over people.
Thankfully, there is an alternative presenting itself. STEEM is enabling people to fill that void somewhat. Over time, if this place grows, we shall see the price appreciate to the point where people are more than making up for what they lost on Facebook. Unlike Facebook, the money you have coming in is based upon the price of the tokens (as long as your following continues to upvote you), not what some central authority says.
This is true. I came here for the Alexa ranking but it has been a good place for many other reasons too.
Facebook got under my skin a couple of months ago with moving friends off of your feed and placing them who knows where. Advertising has become a pain in the butt from large advertising agents, I ignore them all.
What I do now @fitinfun is every post I like and share from Steemit to Facebook and fill my pages and timeline with steemit posts, some may go into relevant Steemit groups, that is all Facebook is worth today.
Pop in and say hi to one or two friends, give a bit of support and share, my advice to anyone using this platform is to start rethinking their strategy.
This post will now be shared to Twitter and Facebook: Steemit Matters Group for Kryptonia and Superior Coin followers to learn from older blogger findings.
Thank you so much Joan. I really appreciate your support. Good idea about sharing steemit to my profile. I do not post on my profile at all now - only to groups. But maybe that will help and I will try.
I have never used Facebook for anything except keeping in contact with friends and family. And since seeing this post and one by @robpyne here, I have taken a careful look at my newsfeed. It seems unchanged.
I wonder why? Maybe it is because I have not shared anything about cryptocurrency or from #Steemit on it? Or is it because I am far away in Africa and not the target of the companies you mention?
I'll keep an eye on things anyway.
I'm not sure - I am in Thailand and post nothing at all to my profile. Thanks for the post link. I see I am not alone in this issue.
Hey! Well I can’t remeber the last time I checked my Facebook or except I have some good people on my Facebook and they haven’t heard of steemit I can check to drop them a message. I have been on Facebook for about 9yrs posting and doing a lot of activities the best thing I could ever get is a like or wired comments! Hahahah. There’s a typo error you were suppose to write at the age of 50 you wrote ago of 50! Kindly check it if corrections can be made!
Thank you for the typo help - got it! We can change everything on our steemit posts except for the first tag and url before the post closes and pays out.
I do also promote steemit where I can on fb and other places and have had a few takers over the months I have been here.
I'm trying to get my mojo back at the moment :)
you welcome!
More and more people are leaving or hardly do anything on fb anylonger. I am one of them. There are better social media and new will come for sure
I sure hope you are right. I'm seeing lots of posts of frustration on all my social media and plugging steemit as much as I can.
My kids don't use Facebook at all but instead SnapChat and WhatsApp. My daughter tells me Facebook is for old people 😂
It's funny how this works, as centralised Facebook becomes ever more authoritarian by it's frantic creator the cannibalisation index rises. Facebook has a whole host of problems right at the plateau of it's usage, people are jumping ship to Steemit who prefer freedom and decentralisation, people are leaving because of policy changes, people are running away because they are realising all Facebook really is, is an information harvesting gigantic tapeworm that sucks out all that is good and leaves you as an addicted zombie scrolling down endless piles of bile that makes up the majority of the content there. All intellectual and beneficial content is running away from Facebook to Steemit, yes Steemit has it's issues but Zuckerberg is not one of them.
Here is an image from a Zerohedge article displaying where Facebook is in its shelf life.
Interesting. I think that might be external searches. The people I care about are searching inside of fb. The searches in there are way down if you go by me and the connections I have talked to.
We have less than 10K of "people who matter" at steemit. That needs to grow exponentially if we are to succeed.
I am not too sure because the article doesn't elaborate, but you can clearly see it has plateaued in a similar fashion to the Myspace trend. It's not just that, I see a general distaste for Facebook these days more and more, it's like it has gotten old and lost it's shine. I think even if people are not using Steemit or another platform they are just using Facebook less and less.
I believe Steemit will grow and we are still at early adoption phase, according to that pic there is less than 1 million users (Facebook has over 2 billion), many of which will not be using Steemit as their main platform..... yet.
You can look at the @acange blog here to see this report generated daily. 677K of those steemit users are considered to be dead accounts by his method of counting.
I count the people over minnow status as "mattering" since something like 90%+ of minnows give up after only a short time here. So that is less than 10K. We need many more than that to succeed here.
I'm definitely seeing people leave fb these days. They either announce if or are not posting if I go to their profiles.
Oh wow ok, lot's of inactive accounts on Steemit then, perhaps they are just lying dormant and many will fire up In the next bull run as word gets out and Facebook declines. It won't happen immediately but over a gradual time span.