12 years
Thanks for the heads-up, Scotch!
From the same article:
Evidence suggests that the algorithm that determines which posts appear in your News Feed, called EdgeRank, has been tweaked so that posts are visible for under 15 per cent of your connections unless you pay.
For individuals the cost to promote a status update is $US7.20 ($A6.95) and for brands the cost depends on how many fans or “likers” they have, but is around $US20 ($A19.30) per post to reach 3000 fans and $US200 ($A193) to reach 50,000 fans.
That adds up really fast!
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.
Not only does this change make it hard to plan a budget, it makes it really hard to justify one. For these prices, is there really a point in using facebook for marketing your hostel at all?
All of our fans can still see everything we write if they visit our page, but how many of your fans are visiting your page on a regular basis? How many will continue to visit without reminders popping up in their news feed?
If you're not spending a lot of time writing posts for the express purpose of marketing, then only reaching 15% of your contacts might not be such a big deal. In an attempt to shed a positive light on this, we do have one advantage over most markets. Our fans tend to be friends with each other as well as being fans of our hostels. We might gain a little bonus percentage if the 15% that we are allowed to reach click 'Like' or share the post with our mutual friends. Of course, that means that our posts have to be extra interesting from now on.
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