Facebook is the most used website in the world, with the most pageviews, most time spent, and most data. They also have more data about you than anyone else, and people spend more time using Facebook on their cell phones than any other app.
There are a lot of parallels between Facebook and Google, as much as there’s a lot of competition – especially for websites. If you’re a website owner, you want to ‘get found’ on both Facebook and Google. On Google you can pay for (Adwords) ads to promote your website. On Facebook you can pay for Facebook ads to promote your website. On both sites you can also promote your business for free (on a Facebook wall or Google organic search). So on each you have both free and paid promotional opportunities.
War of the Algorithms
Google uses algorithms to determine how relevant your content is for organic search vs. your online authority – and this determines how often your web pages show in search results for certain keywords. They use another algorithm (quality score) to determine how relevant your content is for paid Adwords ads in pay per click efforts. Even if you want to pay top dollar for certain keyword ads, if they determine your content isn’t (what they deem) relevant – your ads won’t show.
On Facebook the paradigm is a bit different, everyone posts updates on their “wall”. If you’re a business trying to promote your product or service, your updates get lost in a sea of jokes and new picture posts. Facebook realized a few years back that it was too overwhelming for you to see everything everyone posts all the time in your feed.
Facebook developed their “edgerank” algorithm do determine who’s updates you see in your feed. How often you see certain friends updates depends on your interaction with them over time. If you ‘liked’ a business a year ago (and never interacted with them again), you may never see any of their updates. But if you liked one of their daily updates, you might see every status update they post.
Buy Some Facebook Love
So in Google you can’t just buy organic search rankings, you can’t even buy the top ad spots if they don’t feel your content is relevant. The image above shows a new option in Facebook for paid promotion to “pay for” your post to go the top of news feeds. These would be “promoted posts” (like sponsored Tweets on Twitter).
This isn’t exactly the same Facebook that Mark Zuckerburg refused to have any ads on for years – is it? In fact, some say that Facebook might not even have this available if it weren’t for the IPO. Others say Facebook isn’t worth much because their ad platform doesn’t generate enough revenue (and isn’t that effective). Will paid posts change all that?
So in the end, will Facebook turn out to be smarter than Google by allowing this? Or just selling out?
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