Published: 27th of July, 2022 by Patrick Carpen
Many budding marketers and netrepreneurs often get lured into promoting their product/service through Facebook pages. After all, it seems like a great way to reach a wide audience. However, investing in a Facebook page can be disastrous. I’m speaking from firsthand experience.
Since the year 2014, I have been investing in Facebook pages hoping to make a return on investment, but up to today, I haven’t made a dime, and I’m heavily in dept. That is because of Facebook’s parasitic behavior. All of this is not necessarily the fault of Mark Zuckerberg, but perhaps the thousands of illiterate staff he hires.
You see, Facebook is a huge enterprise, and thousands of staff monitor activities across Facebook. Many of them seem to have a brain the size of a peanut, and most of them seem to have the IQ of a jackass. On many occasions, persons from Facebook misunderstood the intent of my posts and penalized my account.
I’ll put one example into perspective. Since 2018, I started building a facebook page, Guyana, South America, which focuses on content and stories related to the people of Guyana, South America. You can find it at: facebook.com/guyanasouthamerica. However, after spending over 100,000 US dollars, 4 years, and immeasurable effort and energy building the page, the page pulls in little to no traffic.
Yesterday, 27th of July, 2022, Facebook restricted my personal account as well as my Guyana, South America page because I posted a photo of the South Sudan famine of 1993. While I admit that the photo might have indeed been inappropriate, I think Facebook’s action of restricting both my account and my page is draconian. They could have at least issued a warning first. Facebook sent me a message that now my page will reach even less people, as though everything I am already going through is not punishing enough.
I tried to contact Facebook and apologize for the post, and asked them to remove the restriction. I got onto them through advertiser support. A support staff named “Ana” was very rude and told me point blank that there is nothing that can be done. She said that she is not responsible for that department and has no way of connecting me to the responsible department. I asked her to escalate the case to her superiors so that it can receive further attention. She bluntly refused and cut the chat while I was still typing.
Yesterday I made a post that got only 8 reactions from an audience of over 90,000 on my Guyana, South America Page. It seems that Facebook did indeed put a punishing sanction on my page. That’s a lot worse than having a bad hair day.
Eight years ago, I started out on a journey to create content for Facebook. I must admit that it was not the wisest business choice. Today, after 8 years of hard work, and over $100,000 spending on creating content and Facebook advertising, I’m still living in a rented apartment and struggling to pay my bills. Now, with Facebook restricting my page after I thought it was finally taking off, I might be forced to sell everything and go live on the streets.
With that being said, Facebook pages do work for some people. They seem to have some amount of favoritism going on. They seem to be biased towards certain types of content, giving favor to some and oppressing others. The parameters they use are not clear to me.
So, what are some alternatives to Facebook pages? A mailing list is the best investment for content creators. No imbecile from Facebook can rob you of your mailing list audience. If you build a website on WordPress, there are some great plugins like Email Subscribers that help you to build a mailing list with an unlimited number of subscribers. You can email your subscribers once a week with updates, e-magazines, etc, to keep them coming back to your website. Also, build a twitter and other types of social media pages. They may be less draconian.
Looking back at my experience however, my best advise would be to save your money in the bank. You are less likely to lose it there.
