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Does Facebook sabotage non promoted contests?
Usually my reach on facebook is about 4K-7k a post, and we have about 21k following. We’ve ran contests in the past but of course have promoted them, and they did relatively well.
We just ran one last week, and it did terribly. Our digital marketing budget has been frozen due to covid, as I’m sure a lot of yours have. We wanted to run a contest for kids at home (always get people messaging for free stuff for their kids) so we thought it’d do well.
All four posts throughout the week, total got about 6,000 in reach. Which when you look at that compared to a normal post that I do, it’s shit. Go from 6k in one post to 6k collectively in 4 posts.
So my question is, does Facebook know we’re doing a contest that isn’t promoted thru them and purposely sabotage it? Have you guys experienced the same thing? Thanks in advance. I look forward to reading your comments.
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6 Replies
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Facebook effectively made it pay to play a while back. Organic reach is pretty nonexistent for most situations. Good luck getting the same engagement without a budget, because that is going to be difficult.
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Yes.
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Yeah, Facebook is a pay-to-play walled garden. There is no free lunch anymore. They have a very advanced content identification and categorization system.
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Yes. If you use the phrase “like and share” chances are nobody will see it.
I did have one sneak though last year but we were very creative with the image to portray it as a contest, but your image can only be comprised of 20% text so it’s difficult to work around.
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I’ve found it depends. If they get the slightest whiff that you’ll pay for more reach – you will struggle for organic reach. If you don’t pay you will suffer for a bit but when they figure out you won’t pay you’ll start to see improvements in organic reach. If you boost posts they will hold back your organic reach when you stop to encourage you to pay.
We’ve had months with millions of organic reach, before boosting a post and killing organic completely.
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Yes & Yes
Last month my ad account was suspended for violating their policies.
Only trouble is… I had stopped promoting my monthly event, so I wasn’t running any ads. I had started sharing through Groups instead. (By myself, no auto-posters nor bots)
And don’t forget, they approve all ads before they run anyway!A quick request for review (or whatever they called their link) got my Ad Account reinstated in 4 days with no rhyme nor reason why they suspended it in the first place.
BTW: My results were the same as the Ads, and I didn’t spend a dime!
Facebook hates that.
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