Mines pretty annoying, thanks.

My friends, most of whom are also Social Media and web type people, and I have recently noticed an odd thing.

If we post something to our business pages, in my case Designed To A Tee, it doesn’t always show up in our own feeds.

That’s right. It’s our page. We post something. We never see it.

So we started to wonder what our fans/clients/others were seeing then.

Apparently, not much.

If you don’t like or comment or, apparently, click a link that’s posted by a page you like, you will not see that pages updates. Even if you’ve liked the page.

You have to do some hanky panky with also following and other things which my friend who runs Fazenda Rodizio Bar and Grill put on their blog. I won’t rewrite it all here, go read that one!

Why has Facebook done this? Because they want us, the business page user, to pay. The tell us constantly to ‘boost’ our posts. Boost is their fancy way of saying ‘give us money and we’ll let more people see what you have to say’. Which, where I come from, is blackmail.

Now I have a problem with this. My marketing budget is very small. I spend a bit on business cards and of course I own my domain. But to give Facebook any percentage of that small part of my yearly budget, especially since they don’t guarantee reach even if you do ‘boost’ a post, is just not going to happen.

So high cost, low Return on Investment…yeah, think I’ll skip it.

So what to do?

Well, we’ve started a movement, some of these friends of mine and I. A movement towards, believe it or not, Google+.

Now I was the first person to scoff at G+, at the idea that we needed yet *another* social media outlet.

But if Facebook is going to decide for my users and me who gets to see what I say?

Then I say: G+? Here I come.

I don’t have a company page on G+, even though I could. I am trying to consoldate all my social media anyway, so I’m just using Robyn Fraser. It’s still a work in progress, as when isn’t my own stuff, but come take a look. See what I’m talking about.

You’ll actually get to, you know, see it!

By the way, it’s my professional opinion that this attempt at blackmail by Facebook will end Facebook as a marketing tool for small business.

So good luck to them.

I guess.