Facebook Edgerank’s True Purpose Is To Bury Your Content To Replace With Paid Ads

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Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are BRILLIANT!

How does one boil a frog? If you throw a frog into a boiling water pot he will leap out immediately. The proper way is to put a frog into a pot of cool water, let him get comfortable, relaxed and then turn up the heat SLOWLY… Pretty soon he’s cooked! Welcome to the Freemium internet business model.

How is Facebook brilliant? Because they are SLOWLY achieving what no other social network could achieve in making money, for a network you’d likely never want to pay a monthly fee. But in the end the stuff you used to get for free, you’ll pay for…SLOWLY.

Recently with Facebooks Edgerank system, organic reach has fallen to 1-3% and we stand on the precipice of “Facebook Zero,” where you’ll have to pay to get ANY results out of Facebook on reaching the audience YOU PAID to build.

Facebook will tell their fuzzy spin story that “Edgerank helps you see more of your baby nephews pictures,” but the proof shows its true intent. Edgeranks real purpose is to make way for paid ads by burying your unimportant posts Facebook deems less worthy. There are so many crappy posts, Edgerank has to make room to interlace high quality content in between its ads so you won’t feel totally jilted. Before Facebook squeezed lots of people into buying ads to put in your feed there was evidently plenty of room. I recently found that on my Facebook feed, Sponsored posts of Brands I do not follow, number one ad for every 6-8 posts from my friends. I do not follow a lot of Brands or Like them, I’m very conservative on whom I Like.

On top of that the surprising thing I found was that my friends personal paid promoted posts DONT show up earmarked as “promoted” on the posts themselves. I suppose Facebooks position is that we are friends so it’s all cool not to specify those personal posts as paid promotion. I took a poll my Facebook followers and found that at least 30% of them were paying for either personally promoted posts or Fan Page promotions. Judging by the amount of friends who are doing paid promotional personal posts mixed with the one to 6-8 ratio of sponsored ads, there could be paid posts on my wall feeds that number one out of 4-5 by my guess. That’s a lot of ads if you think about it (MySpace), not to mention all the ads down the side of Facebook. The harder Facebooks Edgerank buries your posts, the more money they get out of you to get your posts seen. Brilliant!

Personally I’m kind of offended. Basically Facebook is saying some of my posts dont deserve to be seen by all my followers but GOD FORBID they should miss placing any ADS!
Years ago if Facebook had come out initially and said everyone needs to pay $10 a month for it, no one would join. But maybe someone is already paying that for you? From the poll of my Facebook followers, I found that at least 35% of them were paying for either personally promoted posts or Fan Page promotions. Some like me have paid upwards of $100’s of dollars a month just to promote posts.

Facebook can keep squeezing and let’s face it they can. They have your family, friends and photos held ransom and if you leave to another network, they’ll just buy it and eventually do the same.

In a recent post, I said I’m backing off Facebook. I’m not wasting my time sharing articles around the web and other posts that I know Facebooks Edgerank will bury. Mashable, CNN, etc. you lose. WHY BOTHER IF NO ONE WILL SEE IT? Why waste my time and be competing with myself and Edgerank for good posts that I want my friends to see? I’ve switched to just making a few posts a day that are typed written posts and personal photos here and there.

The results have been amazing, fewer posts mean more quality gets seen, more comments and Likes. Edgerank does not have to decide as much which of my posts are crap that it can put ads in place of them. In fact by leaning out my posts I’m giving them, I’m taking control of my Facebook life. Maybe if we ALL did that Facebook would play a little nicer as it would NEED content to place between the ads instead of having an over abundance it needs to filter.

In the end maybe we should consider harder what we are putting on Facebook if no one is gonna see it.