Live by the Facebook, die by the Facebook.
True story. When I first started working at GunsAmerica in the summer of 2014, I was brought on board with the expectation that I would improve our social media presence. At that time, GunsAmerica wasn’t all that engaged on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Part of my job was to see what potential we could get out of these popular social media destinations.
However, there was one voice within the company that thought we should be circumspect with our social media engagement, and as it pertained to Facebook specifically, that we should stay off of the social network because it was a complete waste of time and energy. That man was GunsAmerica founder and owner Paul Helinski.
Though it may not seem like it now, back in 2014 that was quite a radical position. Every gun manufacturer, gun-rights organization and gun blog was on Facebook, using it as a tool to communicate with fans, drive traffic to homepages and keep up with peers within the industry. Facebook, it appeared, was here to stay. Everyone was doing it. Everyone.
Since GunsAmerica is a sorta quasi-democracy (EXECUTIVE EDITOR NOTE: The f**k it is! I just didn’t feel like arguing incessantly and I knew that I would say I told you so down the road.), we overruled Paul’s recommendation and went ahead and started Facebooking. On a bi-hourly basis, I started running content on the GunsAmerica Facebook page. Every day, seven days a week. Early on, we had some success. Some of our reviews, columns, discussions, news stories went viral. We were getting traffic to our website that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. But quickly things started to change. It soon became harder and harder to engage with our Facebook fanbase.
What was starting to become clear is that Facebook now wanted businesses to pay for “reach.” In other words, if you have 43,000 Facebook fans (like we do), when we publish a post, it may reach 1,000. To “reach” more of those fans, GunsAmerica would have to pay for it. It wasn’t huge money, like you can (what they call) “boost” a post for $10-20 but still instead of reaching all 43,000, you may only reach 4,000-8,000. Now, you can see how that can get pricey. Running 50-plus articles a week on Facebook could cost you an addition $500-$1000 in promotional expenses, aka “boosting.”
A quick sidebar on Facebook terminology, reach is the number of people that see your post, but not the number of people who actually click on it. That number is way lower. So, you may reach 1,000, users but maybe you’ll get 10 percent or 100 to actually click on the article. Clicks are obviously what matters. There is no guarantee that if you boost a post you’ll get a proportionally greater number of clicks.
I think we experimented with boosting posts and ultimately determined it wasn’t worth the money. We decided we’d continue to Facebook, but strictly in an organic fashion. Whatever traffic came from posting articles on our page, we’d live with. We wouldn’t be lining Zuckerberg’s pockets to get clicks from our Facebook readership.
What it looks like to boost a post. A $20 boost will help you reach maybe 2,000 people, of which, maybe 200 will click on the actual article. Not worth it, at least not for us.
I’m sure we weren’t the only gun blog or gun-centric business to come to that conclusion. However, for us, it was an easy decision to make because only a tiny fraction of our traffic comes from Facebook. For other websites, those who invested a lot of time and money into building up their Facebook audience, thus creating a situation where a large percentage of their traffic was coming in via Facebook (I’ve heard rumblings of as much as 60-70 percent), I’m sure the decision was much harder. Some probably ended up promoting — ultimately spending big bucks — to maintain traffic while others probably just decided to cut their losses and take what they could get organically.
Back in February 2016, however, things got decidedly worse on Facebook for the gun industry. Facebook started to suppress posts for a bunch of different websites, including Concealed Nation, The Truth About Guns, Gun Owners of America, USA Carry, among others.
This week, those websites joined forces and put out a press release announcing that Facebook was suppressing news distribution. The coalition says that Facebook has penalized them because users allegedly flagged their content. Subsequent inquiries to further explain the penalties have gone unanswered, as have repeated requests to remove them. But Facebook has offered to show them a free seminar on how to increase traffic with the penalties in place (I guess that’s adding insult to injury).
“We have over 700,000 likes on our Facebook page and tremendous reader response to our material,” said Brandon Curtis, publisher of Concealed Nation, in the press release. “We didn’t change a thing about the way we post. In February, our Facebook traffic fell off a cliff. It sank by nearly 50 percent in that first month.”
The gun-related publishers are currently asking other industry websites to check their reach and engagement for 2016 and report their findings to fbgunfail.com. They want to determine the extent of the suppression as well as the revenue lost because of it.
“Facebook is an invaluable resource for Second Amendment supporters trying to spread the message of responsible gun ownership,” Curtis says. “We’re asking Facebook to remove any penalties on the affected pages, and to create a process that prevents this type of thing from happening again, including a notification system that would notify page owners whose posts are being suppressed. Our readers enjoy and want our content, and it’s frustrating that they are no longer seeing what we post.”
Now here is where my story comes full circle. Paul saw this coming. He knew that Facebook would, either through its corporate greed or its anti-gun establishment, eventually put the squeeze on the gun industry. He warned us not to waste time on a network that was scheming to provide websites readers only to monetize that relationship later on. In a way, Facebook was like a drug dealer handing out free meth in the form of readers. Once everyone got hooked on the free crank, and had abandoned or neglected other ways to generate traffic, it was over. Facebook had them by the short and curlies. They needed Facebook to get their fix. And that’s where we are today. Paul was right.
I feel for those who’ve been affected by the Facebook suppression. In fact, on a personal note, I’m a fan of all those websites. But now is the time to tell it like it is. Guys, my friends and peers within the industry, Facebook is as good as dead for gun-related websites. Things are never going back to the way they were. It’s time to move on.
(EXECUTIVE EDITOR NOTE, AGAIN: This is not about gun freedom. It is about money, like everything else. Facebook relies on advertising to prop up its stock price, and when you give a lot of exposure away free, people will be much less inclined to advertise. We are in the heart of an enormous recession/depression, and money is drying up. Facebook, and everyone else, is going to reward who spends money with them, and nobody else.
I am a casual user of Facebook, and I noticed several months ago that nearly all of my subscribed pages dropped out of my feed. The only ones that come up for me are pages that I recently interacted with. Remember that fact, because I am going to come back to it.
The lead website in question here is one that I saw come onto the scene only several years ago, since the ’08 Obama boom. Back in 2012, at the SHOT Show, I had a chance to meet the owner, who came to my booth to try to sell me advertising. I saw his numbers, and they were great, but the content on his site was crap, mostly just click bait.
It just so happened that year that I got into a tizzy with some gun bloggers about Media Day at the Range. Our industry was fairly new to the internet, and they had overcompensated for a late start by inviting everyone who had a website with anything written about it on guns into SHOT Show, and into Range Day. It was a disaster. The manufacturers ran out of ammo, because guys shooting their “coverage” on iPhones ate it all up. We covered range day with a crew of 4 people, and it cost us thousands of dollars. The next year, because of my posts, Range Day was dramatically altered to allow in only writers and videographers in whom the manufacturers found value. Behind the scenes I was thanked over 20 times, with no exaggeration.
So back to the story. The guy comes to my booth to sell me advertising, and in the process, feels the need to prove he is smarter than me, so he explains how and why he started his website. Turns out he had registered a bunch of domains, or such was his story, all with the same kitchy phrase, and one of them happened to be about guns. After the ’08 Obama explosion in gun sales, this was the domain that took off, because he had brought in an anti-gun ranter to offer a contradictory opinion, and that had generated some buzz for him.
When we spoke, we discussed the broohaha that I had managed to create over Range Day. He said he was going to a blogger meetup later, and that maybe I should come visit and explain that I wasn’t talking about the real bloggers in my attack on the free for all that had become Range Day, even though a few of them were shooting on Iphones coverage that would never see the light of electrons outside their memory card.
I didn’t buy his advertising. He didn’t answer my texts. But instead he posted an article that I thought bloggers all suck. I kept to myself his comment “You know if that guy (meaning the anti-gun guy) didn’t show up on his own, I would have had to create him myself.”
Fast forward to now. I have been explaining to industry people for years that eventually the websites that had built a following on dufus posts would eventually crash and burn, because they were relying on Facebook. Facebook eventually had to throttle back pages that weren’t spending real money with them. 2+2 always = 4.
Gun people aren’t dufuses. We all can get baited into clicking something controversial, but when you click, if you don’t find something that genuinely entertains you, or educates you, or stimulates your thinking, or has a really nice rack, you just aren’t going to repeatedly click on the dufus headline. A churn on Facebook will give you new eyeballs, but now that Facebook is taking their bottom line seriously, the free ride for dufus posts is over.
So that website does have a few interesting thinkers that he has taken advantage of to build his following. But for the most part, I have seen little but fluff. Contrast that with The Firearms Blog that always has a great eye for what gun people are really interested in, because lo and behold, the guy who runs that is an actual gun guy, even though he lives in New Zealand and can’t own most of the stuff.
This is the Alexa for one of the websites in question.
This is our current Alexa. If you check GB you’ll see that we always fall some in the summer because retail gun sales decline, but we have gone down less than them year to year, not that going down is good at all of course.
And just as an apples to apples blogger comparison, this is TFB, which does not rely on inflammatory Facebook posts to build a following.
My take on this Facebook story is that it was manufactured for free publicity. It got some, but it won’t be enough to stop the collapse of a couple websites that never should have received the traffic they got in the first place. I didn’t even get into the story about the other one. He tried to sell me the domain back in 2009 (I remember because I was in Hawaii for my brother’s wedding while talking to him). The moral of the story is that websites that post useless content ultimately fail, especially using Facebook, because Facebook only gives free exposure for what you “like”.
Don’t believe every story you read that plays on your 2A defense mechanism. Most of the world is about money. Sure, the oligarchs would love to take away our guns. Why would they want the serfs to be armed? If you were an oligarch would you want the serfs to be armed? Anyway…. -ph)
Thank you for all you bring to the citizens so that they may become more informed and educated on arms and ammo and articles around the country that ultimately affect us all.
It doesn’t matter I still read your website and Facebook doesn’t have any influence in my decision making.
One of the blogs in question (TTAG to be precise) is not dependent upon FB traffic for survival as it has a massive .com presence (with its performance figures posted quarterly), with millions of monthly hits. Its rant is that FB’s actions appear to be politically motivated, as is consistent with its conduct in banning gun sales and now actively rooting out private gun sale sites. FB is in fact closely associated with the Obama administration, and has whole heartedly promoted the administration’s anti-gun policies. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that its recent actions are simply a further effort to the same end: banning all guns from Facebook. Whether that is through banning or charging excessive fees for maintaining a site is merely the means to the end. By the way, TTAG does not sell anything to the public; its only “sales” are advertising space.
Want to see JUST ONE social media web site that pledged and maintained a Total-Objectivity policy, with absolutely no human influence from its search, post, and statistical operations. Let all posts, trends, likes/dislikes, etc. happen and display without ANY human bias, interference, influence, or skewing … I know, fat chance at that happening, but …
4chan – but be warned, total anonimity + total freedom = total anarchy
Hi there, I also never use Facebook and never will. Just like in America, here in Germany Facebook is blocking and banning every conservative comment. And I can tell you, when I was active in the Pegida movement in Berlin I had to use Facebook as a guest, just to keep myself updated on the latest horrific news. And you won’t believe how many freaks and jackasses are using Facebook to spread their hateful “leftist” propaganda (to me they are in fact no left-political people but fascists Hitler would be proud of). They were always trying to make fun of the serious and truth-written Pegida entries and Facebook is filled with so many nutjobs in general worldwide that it is a horror to use. And of course, “leftist”-extremist entries or radical religious entries (Antifa, Islamist movements) strangely never get blocked and/or deleted at all. This is what I just saw as a guest (not as a member because only idiots would openly join Facebook) and so this was already enough for me.
And there is also a personal thing why I would never join Facebook as well (now I even refuse of visiting it as a guest). Their owner, this Mr. Suckabug, or whatever his name is, is a millionaire yet he is so ugly that all he can find as a companion is a woman from some 3rd world country that surely just tooked him because he got all the money. Reminds me of those losers that go to Thailand and other poor low-wage countries because they are too fat and ugly to find a decent and truthful wife in their own country. Besides all the propaganda spreading and deletion of politically incorrect postings this is another huge reason for me to never use Facebook at all, just like Wikipedia which I also recommend of not using at all!
Actually and sadly Suckerberg is a billionaire, but the rest including right including opinions on it are right.
Never been there and never will. It should die and go away!
Ah yeah, sorry for the millionaire thing. As I don’t care about Facebook at all I am not much into the news about its owner. And I surely never will. Isn’t it amazing that you can earn so much money by just creating a website where people post their ugly self-shots (I hate this stupid name “selfie”) and where only politically correct sayings are allowed? Our todays time is in serious trouble!
Every gun store and gun show should post a banner about Facebook’s racism to the gun industry. The NRA should post it on their site!
When did guns become a race?
How about the intolerance and outright bigotry against the gun industry and it’s attempt to further the America’s God granted right and freedom to keep and bear arms and to protect our constitution’s Bill of Right to do so.
What do you expect when Facebook is controlled by a devout libtard, I am sure most of the others are as well. Sad to think that goes on, but that is typical of their hypocritical policies.
Leftist want censorship. When Obama’s followers had their way, there would be no conservative views expressed, anywhere.
Look at who is screaming for the end of talk radio. Leftist radio can’t survive on its content, since even liberals can’t take constant hatred. Guns and gun owners are viewed as bad people. Well, we aren’t.
This publisher did exactly what every normal American left in the country should do. Educate to take the market away from these global elite liberal owned social and main stream media networks which is the biggest threat to freedom. The 2nd amendment is not our greatest protector of freedom, freedom of speech is! Speaking a word aggressfully can be more powerful than picking up a rifle! Facebook willfully commited racism and should be sued into oblivion. America is at war, right now! Freedom, health, and prosperty are all under major attack. If the government isn’t trying to take rights away from hard working law abiding citizens than it is destroying our financial wealth through the central bank manipulated Federal Reserve! The dollar is on its way down to be replaced by SDRs (basket of currencies) to bring all of the world’s central banks together as the world’s official unelected government! Our food is so posioned if we are not dependent on these elaborate health services by the time we are 40 we will by 50. Monsanto has killed far more Americans than any terrorist organization could ever dream of and makes billions doing it!!! The billionaire creater of GMOs that are known to kill lab rats has caused heart disease and diabetes to double in this country since the 90s by bringing high frutose corn syrup on the market that is dervied from GMO corn. 2000 statics (much worse now) 400,000 Americans die each year from a chronic illness that people with diabetes are prone to get. I could rant on and on what I am trying to say we seriously need to start a social frenzy that brings people who are consciously aware of the war and first target and take out the business from under the main stream media and some of the social networks! We need to speak up at the work place, the dinner table and stop letting self pride of the country blind us of our ignorance. We really need to educate our fellow brother you can hold on to that gun all you want to, but until we are united that comes through communication we are going to keep losing war, eventually momentum will be unstoppable. Just look how some of the ADD brainwashed by media people are now, what do you think is going to happen after the engineered economic collapse happens? Chock points are established and riots break out? Divided, confused and mental defeated we are and still will be gullible to what ever we are told, then it will be too late after paper currency becomes useless, digital currency becomes the norm for complete control.
If I can’t be allowed to defend myself and instead capitulate that self-defense to the state and they fail, then what recourse do I have? What recourse do I have against a state, that I perceive to be against my self-interest of self-defense? What if I perceive the state as willing and wanting to violate my rights and instead seeks to kill me for defiance of them? The right of self-defense is a universal and natural right. What recourse do I have anymore?
I call Facebook; FASCISTBOOK. I left a couple years ago because of censorship and people flagging my comments because they destroyed their propaganda and out-right lies. The site is nothing but a listening post for our out-of-control government. How else could you get people to tell you everything that they’re feeling and thinking? FB is a tool of the LEFT. Post at your own risk!
For our Executive Editor, I just want to correct something important. The plural of ‘doofus’ is ‘doofi’. The ACLU got involved when people who lisp complained that too many ‘s’ made them drool. A personal note for those who are asked if they received a ‘tweet’ or sent a tweet, I simply respond that I’ve never ‘twatted’ before, therefor I’ve not received their twat. Simply ask them where you can get a twat account. I assure you the conversation will change to a different topic. As our license tags say in New Hampshire, ‘Live Free and Die’. : )
Only if dufus is Latin and the subject is male. Hitlery for example and her lady pals would be dufae I think but I took Latin 50 years ago so who the heck knows? I do know for sure the lib social media is not for decent Americans hoping for fair treatment of their concerns.
I am a current Latin student. You are correct. The plural of masculine would be dufae in the nomitave case.
When social media came about, it gave the people a tool for true freedom of speech. We no longer had to get all our information funneled to us from the same old bought and paid-for mass media outlets. They’ve apparently been successful at limiting that. Facebook is dead. I’m waiting for another, more freedom oriented social media network to pop up that has the power to compete with Facebook. Gun bloggers, don’t spend a dime on Facebook. Use it to keep your websites modernized and competitive. Good luck y’all.
There’s a fatal flaw in your logic: “Facebook, it appeared, was here to stay. Everyone was doing it. Everyone.” WRONG. I don’t belong to any social media sites, and never will. In my opinion nothing good comes from them and there are many (especially from my generation) who agree. Common sense tells me that just because something is new, and everyone is “doing it”, doesn’t mean it has value.
FB HAS SUSPENDED AND DELETED MY ACCOUNT FOR MAKING PRO-GUN POSTS SINCE 2011. I DO NOT USE FB FOR ANYTHING! WE NEED A PRO-GUN ALTERNATIVE TO FB. FB IS NOT THE ONLY ONE THAT BLOCKS ME; WASHINGTON POST, INFO WARS, MSNBC… THE GATESTONE INSTITUTE AND DRUDGE DON’T BLOCK ME.
I tried Facebook for a couple of weeks a few years back…meh. I guess I am not that desperate for attention.
Ever since I asked a CIA associate of mine around the time FB was gaining momentum how ‘business’ in the ‘trenches’ was going and she said “…It’s going to get a lot easier with this explosion of social media…” I was also warning people about FB social media for years and received similar treatment Like Paul did but guess what buddy!, we’ll get the last laugh…only it might be followed by blood tears in the last shot glass of the last bottle…of the last celebration of freedom.
Because now Face Book and it’s Anti-Constitutional and Treasonous management/ownership is outed as becoming integrated with their own new ‘Facial Recognition’ APPS with the new FBI National Identification Biometrics and Face Recognition sytem being formed as more and more cameras with the attendent software are coming into play.
And of course just this week Face Book got busted out with their questionable political ‘marketing’ fix by manipulating web content and hits to favor the HellBitch’s campaign!
Once they get universal background checks into full swing, it will be nothing to match any 4473 purchase–or now all private party sales which must have paperwork– (Shumer’s latest newly introduced bill (Fix backgrouind checks law) this month)
Just think how fast and easy they’ll integrate that with your ‘National I.D. card’ (REAL I.D. act of 2005) with Face Recognition photos. (About half the states are currently in compliance), And how fast they’ll come a knocking…knock, knock, knocking on your gun safe door??
…without a warrant, no less. Because that’s what this new Biometric rights intrusion system by the FBI will use as the new ‘probable cause’ to seize your guns. Check it out.
Facebook is no different than Google in this sense. SEO marketing went through many changes, some to make Google more money, most to make Google more relative. At the end of the day you just have to write it off as the cost of doing business. There’s always more ways to engage your readership, never become stagnant or waste energy with complaining.
If you don’t stand up a bit, they will continue to run over you. They may be a private company and have the right to delete what they don’t want on their site, but it is our right to make noise and tell everyone what is really happening. There are many out there who do not understand that they are deleting much of the conservative, pro-constitution material and promoting the progressive, anti-American crap.
I think this “complaint” is less about needing more ways to reach a readership, and more about a sudden suppression of content. I don’t know anything about SEO marketing, but I know that facebook has a strong recent history of suppressing 2A related content. They’re free to do what they want with their network, but I don’t have to like it.
So you have been supporting anti-gun farce book and making zuckerboy a millionaire – and you complain to us???
It’s not only the gun industry Facebook also regulates and deletes post of America flags and rebel flags
And now they delete post about the Muslim world and have partnered with the president to censor anything about Islam and the Muslim community
Freedom of speech is only for the idiots and far left
Gun toting God fearing Americans are labeled as terrorist and anything to do with our Second Amendment is persecuted on Facebook and other media
Please keep up the good work and screw the media we all know what your doing is great for AMERICA
Could you make test: if you have people subscribed(followed) your page (not just liked)? Will all user receive 100% of post or not without extra pay? It is important because i will have rethink using of Facebook if i cannot receive all messages i ve subscribed.
Absolutely not. It never was. You are better to sign up for the company/band/person’s mailing list.
I’m proud to say that I have never had a FB account. Neither has my wife. We’re in our 30s and we are literally the only two people I know about whom I can say that. I forbid my friends and family from putting any photos of us or our children online as well. I don’t use twitter or instagram or whatever else is the fad right now either. In the 21st century, invasions of your privacy are everywhere. I can’t for the life of me see why anyone would be complicit in their own violation.
Same here- never had ’em -never will have ’em.
FB is a tool to monitor the users and control what they see/hear. Their HQ is literally next door to Google.Both are in the BIG BUSINESS of monitoring and used as an info-controlling organ of the Political Elite -the same ones who control the government “Establishment”.
Facebook is a farce. I got on it when my daughter moved 3,127 miles away for college. I was on it for o keep in touch with her in a way she enjoyed. From the beginning I did not like it and within a year stopped using it. Unfortunately that little bastard who owns it is a hypocrite and hates guns. He has up to 14 armed bodyguards when bye runs or is outside. So he makes it hard for people who like guns to use his platform. My suggestion is don’t use it, never use it and gun owners should get off of the site also. Maybe the NRA should come up with something like Facebook for gun owners. Screw the libertards.
I like the idea of a Facebook like community just for gun enthusiasts. Call it “3G” for GUNS, GUYS, and GALS.
Yes, FB doesn’t really distribute a business post to followers unless it is paid to do. In the end, businesses will wake up and realize that no income of any merit comes in through FB and they will stop buying advertising. On a related note, with a personal account one only sees 20-30% of what friends post.
For those who don’t get it, Facebook really is all about the money. Keep in mind that if it is free to you on the Internet then you the user aren’t the buyer, you’re the product they sell! How do you think Zuckerberg got so rich? It sure wasn’t cause the money fairy came along and waked him with her magic wand!
Zuckerberg sells your eyeballs directly, and uses all the information he has on you to package you up and sell your, like a slice of processed meat in a package you but at the grocery. Oh so you deleted your account, or you never had a Facebook page in the first place, well he collects information about you too and he sells your info in a package just love everyone else
I fortunately have never ‘face booked twitted or whatever’ – This a kids game of constantly flushing bits
of useless information to people they don’t know – What a waste of time! –
This whole article that just wasted a bunch of space could’ve been summed up in two words, Fakebook Sucks!! There, done deal.
Fakebook is crap. I used it for a short time right after it became popular. Trying to quit and get off their radar was a monumental job. It took six months or better. I was about to turn to my attorney for help when I finally succeeded in being removed from their mailings. Zuckerberg is a greedy POS and I look forward to the day when normal people take back government and his monopoly is broken up.
Get off Facebook and get off Google as much as you can. These people are not our friends.
I realize businesses don’t have a real choice, but we individuals do. It’s addicting to sit on Facebook for hours and waste your precious time on Earth reading about your friends’ bowel movements, but you are their product and your usage of Facebook lines their pockets.
Both are destroyers of businesses. One flick of the switch by Google and your online business efforts are dead.
It is about money. It isn’t just the gun industry they do it to. They have been tamping down on game companies and authors, and people running Kickstarter campaigns for years. I recently had a product go live on Kickstarter that ran views to a separate page I run. Within 30 new views FB was shaking me down for cash. Social Media is just another big video game. There are ways to “play” to get some free action, but eventually you are going to pay.
+1 on that Casey.
Hmmm! A few months back I was blocked from Facebook. Since I am some 3000 miles from most of my family and HS Clasmates I created a Facebook personal page. With those in place I began doing some communicating with my Facebook fans. Then I was suddenly blocked from Facebook. No ‘No No’ or anything. I know I had not defamed anyone, used vulgar language, or any thing that One could think of. Those are just not me. I made several request to Facebook Support was that ‘You Have Been Banned’. I repeatedly requested a reason and every time I would get the same answer. I do not have a clue what or why.
Eventually I was able to get an email from most of my fans, asking them. Nothing. So now I am a one-man band telling everyone that Facebook does not respect its members. It is all about how filthy rich Zunkerberg is. What happened to interrity.
I’m Gone! Thanks for listening.
Houstin
All of this social media crap is owned/operated by a bunch of millennial liberal Obama kiss-asses!
You make absolutely no sense in referencing politically liberal individuals/grouos given it is financially driven & no political party has a greater stake there than another, albeit the conservatives tend to be the ones with the money, for the most part.
As soon as I see someone blaming an individual politician his/her ignorance is showing.
So easy to blame one person, but oversimplification is shallow & useless commentary.
As to FB I simply don’t waste my time
After reading this ‘blog’ I feel I have no clue what he was even talking about besides FB is bad. I already knew that and if us in the industry did not already know that FB would eventually pull the preverbal plug then maybe we should not be on social media anyway. Come on all, everybody knows guns, just there existence, hurts pretty white lil baby seal pups and can make you put on weight.
Second this motion: I can’t follow the action in the editor’s footnote, and for that matter, the article writer’s description of “boost” didn’t add up to anything, despite the picture.
Yea we kind of skipped over the original story, sorry. A bunch of gun blogger websites that had used FB a lot came out saying that FB was throttling them because they are anti-2A. They are anti-2A of course, but it had nothing to do with why these companies were being throttled.
I have never trusted FB. I don’t care what movie/tv show you saw last night, when you when to the bathroom last, or what
low information reality show personality is your favorite. I still believe in snail mail, the telephone, and in some cases email as the way to communicate way the people I feel a need to communicate with securely. I do believe the internet is a great tool for info (education) and new ideas, but one needs to be careful and know that where you go is monitored. This being said go out there and try top make it a great day and know that BIG BROTHER is listening (sad but true).
All law abiding, legal gun owners should stop using Facebook and watch them start losing money.
Facebook is a California company.
That should tell you all you need to know.
I use my posts on it to counter the posts made by ultra-left and radicalized minorities. My whole account is under attack, and I don’t know how long I will be able to keep it up.
I don’t advocate shutting someone down, I encourage debate, free speech, because, with the left and their toady radicalized minorities, an open exchange of ideas is where they lose ground and face.
Where they once might have held the moral high ground (during the time of real segregation, for example, which occurred in both the North and the South, than-you-very-much.), they have surrendered it to greed, wrath, gluttony, envy and sloth.
Riots are meant to stifle the right to gather and speak. Censorship, violence, intolerance, these are the tools-of-the-trade for fascism. You only need to watch the news (except Fox) to see how corrupt the radical parties have become; I see dark days ahead.
I believe that Trump’s election to be President of the United States is the last chance my generation will have to correct the mistakes it made during the sixties.
This is my “mea culpa”; we over-corrected, and now those we tried to help and uplift just want to oppress us.
I guess now I know how my parents felt.
We need our own Facebook. We should call it Mirrors, because all I see now are reflections of my past errors.
The 2A is not the only thing under attack.
If FB is dead for our industry what social media sites are you going to concentrate on?
For us it doesn’t really matter. We have over 800,000 subscribers and a couple million people buying and selling guns on the website every month. We have a twitter, but we’ve never made any great effort to build it up.
The GA Instagram has more of a following anyways. Facebook has always been too liberal for our kind.
Instagram is a lot of work lol. Blanellberry has been doing a good job but we could do a lot more with it. It really doesn’t matter though. Nobody builds a website for the public good. Everyone is in it for making money, and if there are eyeballs on a website, you have to monetize them. I’ve explained to many people over the years that all web popularity gets you is expenses. If you don’t have a way to monetize it first, you end up trying to wrangle ideas that take away part of what you used to do for free, and why people found you so valuable. Remember hotornot.com? It was huge. But they didn’t turn it into a dating site fast enough to save it from crashing and burning. Making money from anything online is tough. Everyone wants stuff for free. Do you know that on my south florida gun selling boards, despite being shut off twice by FB, people are still listing guns for sale, when they could use GunsAmerica free local, and I’ve told them that. We probably get over 100k people on GA in soflo in the course of a month, compared to a handful of people who see the posts on the FB board. Online most of the time makes no sense.
There is a new conservative-owned gun site called gundistrict.com that might be worth checking out. Our gun club has a group there. All guns all the time.
So I am confused. The people in the article above want you to believe that it’s mostly about money when it’s not. If it was then every viral post would need to pay or FB would kill it off. AND YES THEY CAN DO THAT! This is about some people deciding that you should do and believe what they say you should. FB is one of those. If you think it’s not, I have some land 90 miles SW of Miami to sell you. People should quit trying to make excuses for the corrupt people in our world. It is now common practice to say that I am privileged so you should do what I say or I will bring my wrath down upon you. It’s all about power. Today power comes from money. It will change. The question is how that change will come to be. Ask the Czars, Napoleon, Hitler, the Roman Senate, etc. Good luck to those of you who have bought into the government cares about you.
Why people get involved with the social media is beyond me. I don’t twitter nor do I facebooger. Never did, never will.
+1 with you there Joe! Fakebook and all that other worthless crap is a waste of time and space. I don’t do fakebook period so if that’s how some dealers run their business then they won’t get mine cause I don’t waste my time!
I always thought FB was kind of dumb. Then I saw that it made people dumber: Betty & Bob post up they’re taking by that Alaskan cruise and come home to find their house has been hit! Yeah, dumb.
Now I find your very telling little story of the reality of FB. I think if it wasn’t “gunners” being taken advantage of but some mainstream-type sector being bullied you’d be hearing about it on the national news at dinner time.
If I have a friend and we both use FB, I mention that I use the public range to shoot. He goes on FB and tells his FB friends that I use a public range they all tell their friends and so on, etc. millions of FB fans know that I use the public range to shoot my gun. What if I don’t want thousands of people to know that I have a gun. It’s like MLM or the inverted triangle that can collapse and bury you. I don’t use FB to talk about personal stuff especially guns. Another thought “Big brother is watching and listening”. Thanks for the space to allow me to vent.
Executive Editor’s 1st note… 🙂