If you’re an online publisher or internet marketer who finds Facebook to be an effective tool to push your content, REJOICE! But if you’re someone who laments the disappearance of the “social” part of “social networking”, prepare for Facebook to suck even more. You may already realize that the reason your feed is so boring is that Facebook limits what you see to about 7% of your friends posts (and more like 3% of pages you follow!), so they can sell users “reach”. And by “reach” they mean imaginary people in Southeast Asia, as explained in the video below. But fear not, your feed is about to get even spammier with paid placements in April, when Facebook rolls out the “Instant Articles” program to all publishers and users, not just the major media outlets that have had access to it so far. Since anyone under 45 with even a moderate level of intelligence has pretty much bailed from engagement on the site at this point, this may not be much of a tragedy. But if you DO still like seeing your friends’ posts on Facebook, good luck finding them amongst the ever-increasing volume of paid placements in your feed.
Facebook Like Fraud
The fact that Facebook is mostly a racket to get people to pay for likes and reach is fairly common knowledge, but if you didn’t catch this video a few years ago, you may be surprised to learn just how much of a racket it is: