The ICU Medical Facebook page has 7,271 people that “like” our page as I write this. Roughly 1,000 of these likes came through organic efforts to reach out to clinicians with whom we wanted to have an ongoing dialog. The rest came as a result of a series of carefully targeted Facebook ad campaigns that cost us in aggregate a whopping $6,245.42.
I know that in the scheme of things, that’s not a lot of money. But I want it back. And I want it now!
You see, despite paying Facebook for those incremental likes, most of 6,000+ carefully targeted clinicians who make up that number are now blocked from viewing our posts.
In fact, when Facebook rejiggered their algorithm alchemy in September to allegedly give users stories that more closely aligned with their interests, our reach dropped by more than 50%.
Now, we work hard at ICU Medical to try and engage with our audience in a meaningful way. The negative feedback we receive in the form of people hiding our posts or “disliking” us is miniscule. The positive feedback is, well, very positive.
Yet, according to a recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Facebook “changed its algorithm to hide posts that generated a lot of complaints and boost posts that didn’t draw complaints. That’s lowered the number of complaints about spam that Facebook’s received—but it also hit the unpaid, organic reach some advertisers were getting on Facebook.”
Not to mention taking away reach that advertisers like us paid good money to Facebook to obtain.
So Mark, make the check payable to ICU Medical, Inc. and send it to my attention at 951 Calle Amanecer, San Clemente, CA 92673 and we’ll call it even.
Thanks.
© 2012 Tom McCall
