Facebook has recently changed its policy in regards to what content it thinks you want to see. It doesn’t matter if you as a fan of anything from Twilight to chocolate ice cream have decided to like a page…it’s no longer enough.  Facebook will decide if you really want a page’s content based upon how many people comment on a specific article or give a specific article a thumbs up. In other words, if you are just a Facebook lurker, someone who is really interested in content but doesn’t comment on, or thumbs up anything, both you and we get hurt because you (as is your right) want to be a bit of an online introvert.

Over the years, I’ve been a regular visitor to many fansites. However, I was a big content reader not a frequent poster.  Starting in 2001, for a solid 7 years the first thing I did every day when I went online was look at Mugglenet. In those 7 years I don’t think I made more than 5 comments total.  Now with today’s options of viewing fansites via their Facebook feeds, had I chosen to participate on Mugglenet  by liking them on Facebook and viewing their content via the Facebook newsfeed I’d miss out. Why?  I would not see the Mugglenet facebook page content in my newsfeed  because Facebook would decide I was not interested because I didn’t comment or thumbs up, and they’d assume others didn’t want it either!  In short, I’d only see the content if I visited their Facebook page directly.

The Twilight Lexicon has roughly 65,000 Facebook fans. For us to reach all of the people who have chosen to like us on Facebook, the denizens at Facebook wants us to PAY for that privilege. EVERY TIME WE POST to the tune of approximately $200. As we post roughly 4-6 stories a day in slow months and 10-15 in busy months, you could see how economically this will be impossible. The costs inside of a week to ensure that everyone saw everything would be more than my mortgage payment FIVE TIMES OVER. On a slow month it would equal my son’s college tuition. So for free, we can reach roughly the 10% of you that comment. In any fandom or online enterprise only 10% leave a comment, this is not a statistic that only applies to Twilight.

To show how this goes beyond fandom, here’s who else this hurts: The mom and pop restaurants, community theatre groups, alumni groups…ANY GROUP WITH ROUGHLY OVER 450 FOLLOWERS IS NOW FACING THIS.

This screen capture of a story we posted today about the Breaking Dawn 2 calendar shows how Facebook decided only 11%, roughly  7K of our 65K followers, wanted to know this info.

This article from  Always Upward explains it really well:

Last week, an interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “stunning“) tidbit began appearing at the bottom of status updates posted by page admins, visible only to them—the number of people each post reached, accompanied by the percentage of their total fan base it represented.

The number shown doesn’t represent the number of your fans online at the moment; it’s the abysmally small number Facebook bothered to publish in newsfeeds. Yeah. You read that correctly. Most of your fans don’t receive your posts. At all. In any way, shape, or form. Facebook is only sharing them with fans who repeatedly return to your page, post on your page, comment on your page, or otherwise engage on your page. In other words, the minority.

The following day, another tidbit appeared, just to the right of the scary percentage—a “Promote” button. Tap that, and you’re asked to pay for the rest of your fans to see the post. Uh huh. Read that one correctly too. Pay to post. Not to advertise—to reach the fans you already have. The ones who thought clicking “like” added you to their newsfeeds.

The article cited above has a follow up that is also really good. There are some solutions proposed in both articles that may or may not work that you, the user, can take.

What our take on this? We’ll still have the Facebook page, but if you don’t want to miss any daily Twilight Lexicon content we suggest the following:

1.  visit here directly

2. Follow us on Twitter,  (at least over there no one seems to be perpetually tripping over their feet to fix what ain’t broke by screwing the little guy and or for that matter, running amuck with their privacy policy on a regular basis)

One last thing, do us a favor and EMAIL your friends about this, because if they follow us on Facebook, chances are they are going to miss this post.