Facebook Locks Down Personal Profiles

The latest bit of money-grubbing nonsense from Facebook is that we can now no longer syndicate our posts to personal profiles. You know, those personal profiles that indie authors like me have spent years building into lists of thousands of people. Now we have to create pages and get fans to like our pages instead. In other words, we have to go down our exhaustive lists of people and spam them with invites to like our pages if they want to keep seeing syndicated updates from our blogging and promotional sites.

So I’m going to apologize in advance for spamming you all. I’m not a fan of doing that, but Facebook is now giving me no choice in the matter. If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of my updates, like my Scott Michael Stenwick author page and everything posted here will keep syndicating to you. Make sure you leave notifications on if you want to keep reading my posts – which, I expect, is the main reason you would want to follow my page since I don’t post much of anything personal on my Facebook account anyway.

Frankly this whole thing sucks, and as I see it, it provides no real value to Facebook users. It’s little more than another attempt to push people like authors into paying money for Facebook promotion – which, by the way, is not worth it, does not generate any sales, and is little more than a big cash funnel for Mark Zuckerberg, who already has plenty of money. Facebook really wants to be the social network that everyone uses, and it has largely succeeded at that. But it also wants to make sure that any avenue for making real money by promoting products and the like is cut off for users.

I’ve long been convinced that online advertising is a gigantic house of cards that will eventually fall. Personally, I never have ordered anything off an online ad, and not only that, I don’t know anyone else who has either. So the only money to actually be made in online advertising is made by Facebook, Google, and other companies that sell the ads. Maybe there’s some critical mass where it has some value for big companies. But I’ve tried doing online ads for my books, and so has Pendraig, and they never managed to get anywhere close to recouping their investment. The only people who made money were – you guessed it, Google and Facebook.

I also have tried running ads over on my other blog, Augoeides. I had banner ads that ran over there for two years, trying to build up enough revenue to cross the $10 threshold for Google to pay me anything. I was at something like $9.50 after those two years, and then Google changed their program so that all of a sudden everything rebooted and they never paid me anything. That’s why you don’t see ads over there and you never will – I’m not going to let one of those big companies sucker me again. I also am now officially boycotting Facebook advertising over their continual screwing around with our ability to promote things – but seeing as I know better than to spend any money on Facebook ads, they aren’t going to notice anything.

I’ll still be posting my links over on Facebook because hate it or not, it’s where everyone is. Now I just have to do it manually. Oh, and I tried connecting up my author page, which they’re supposed to allow, and guess what – it doesn’t work and returns an error message that provides no information indicating why it failed. I’ll figure it out eventually, but it’s just one more piece of annoyance that they aren’t even letting me do this thing that’s supposed to work. So I’m stuck with posting everything manually until I have the time to troubleshoot it and come up with a fix that makes it start working again.

I am going to look into other possible areas for online promotion, and I’ll be announcing those as they come up. Blog posts from here already go to Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to Facebook – which I now have to mess around with in order to keep up and running. For those of you who go ahead and like my author page, I thank you all very much in advance. I appreciate your support and interest in my work – which, pretty obviously, Facebook doesn’t share.