Giving Up on Facebook?

Like many Facebook page owners, I've been disappointed with Facebook's recent moves to reduce the number of page fans who see your page's posts in their news feeds, and then turning around and pushing page owners to pay to restore their posts' visibility. Anyone who 'likes' our page can generally be assumed to be interested in what we have to say, but my post stats shows that 80-85% of them don't see our updates anymore and I have no idea who sees them and who doesn't, or why.

Broken on Purpose

It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

I fully understand that Facebook needs to generate revenue, and they have a really valuable product to offer: people and their attention. But I can't help feeling disrespected as a page owner and as a Facebook user. As a page owner I've worked hard to gain fans by promoting our page to people who've bought our candy, and furthermore may have already paid Facebook in the form of ads to acquire some fans. As a user myself, it's really frustrating to realize that my professed interests are sometimes being disregarded on grounds I can't figure out.

So now as a micro-business, I am starting to question how much effort to put into Facebook anymore. These articles resonated with me. What are your thoughts?

FACEBOOK: I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK 

At Dangerous Minds, we post anywhere from 10 to 16 items per day, fewer on the weekends. To reach 100% of of our 50k+ Facebook fans they’d charge us $200 per post. That would cost us between $2000 and $3200 per day—but let’s go with the lower, easier to multiply number. We post seven days a week, that would be about $14,000 per week, $56,000 per month… a grand total of $672,000 for what we got for free before Facebook started turning the traffic spigot down in Spring of this year—wouldn’t you know it—right around the time of their badly managed IPO.

 
[CASE STUDY] Is it worth paying to promote Facebook posts?

Since we can only play by the rules Facebook sets, occasional outlays of cash to help our posts reach more Facebook users should probably be considered part of the promotional toolkit going forward.