Which Would You Choose: No Facebook Or “Pay To Play”?

Let’s get serious for a minute.  Do you think Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and said, ”Hey, let’s start an open community online platform, and lets do it for free forever”?  Somehow, I highly doubt that.  Very few people do anything for free.  Social media changes every second and managing it all is overwhelming.  People argue that Facebook is about driving traffic to your site, while others say it’s the level of engagement and brand loyalty you can create.  One thing I can say about Facebook is they made it easy.  You don’t have to write interesting articles every day.  All you have to do is post something that’s different with good content.  Your organic readers will reward you and it won’t cost you a cent.  The reality is if you want to be a part of the team or get in on the social media game, you will have to eventually pay to play, with dollars and/or time.  Since most media platforms charge, what makes Facebook so different?  Every business should have that opportunity.  Let’s remember it wasn’t that long ago a business was paying several thousand dollars for a placeholder in print.  All good business evolve, and the one thing Facebook did right was to afford small business owners with the same opportunities to reach new clients as large corporations.  I would be more worried about the power of Google then having to pay for a news feed on Facebook.   It has been 6 months since Facebook elected to change its news feed and content delivery, and I have yet to see a drastic change in the organic reach from posts.  It basically comes down to this: create good content, appeal to your most engaged buyers and don’t forget to maximize as many platforms as possible. 

My only request to Facebook is please add a dislike button.