How to Turn Facebook Throttle Into Good Facebook is just one of many, many ways to reach your audience.
By Grant Cardone Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The average Facebook user has hundreds of friends and likes probably about 50 pages. That means there are a lot of updates in the newsfeed, which is apparently why Facebook throttles the number of people who see any given post. If you find yourself being throttled like me, don't blame their algorithm -- take responsibility for it. Your reach is whatever you want your reach to be. Creativity follows commitment. Most people won't make enough effort to make their posts engaging enough to the audience they've built - or more common, they never bother to build a large audience in the first place.
I've worked hard to build an audience. I've done countless interviews in the past 30+ years. For years I went selling door-to-door doing presentations that I mostly didn't get paid for. I estimate I've easily done more than 11,000 unpaid speaking gigs and about 2,000 paid speaking gigs. I've been motivated to get in front of audiences for years because I know I have to get known.
The success that I have created in both my business and social media was not the result of one thing I did right, but rather a continual commitment to omnipresence. I went from no social following in 2008 to being among the most followed business experts in the world. Since 2009 I've used every medium possible to get my name known to the public. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same.
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Do you know I did 900 live streams in about 95 days, maybe 100 days max? That's not an exaggeration. I became the #1 Meerkat streamer in the world back when Meerkat meant something. I became obsessed with social media because I know if you don't know me, you won't buy from me. I have great products that will help a lot of people, so I want 7 billion people to know my name. My problem is not Facebook throttling my page, my problem is obscurity and I take full responsibility for it.
If someone doesn't know me, that's my fault. A couple of posts are not going to do it. There's no way a couple of posts are going to do anything for me, or you. Here are the monster numbers that you're competing with:
Pinterest:14 million items are pinned every day.
YouTube: 300 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds.
Email: Hundreds of millions of emails sent every 60 seconds.
Facebook: There are over 500,000 likes every minute
Tinder: I don't even use it, but there's probably a lot of stuff happening there.
You get the picture. These numbers are constantly growing and will only get bigger. There are 277,000 tweets every 60 seconds, and you guys think I do too much? I have over 100,000 tweets in eight years. If you could put them all together at once and post them, I'd take over Twitter for less than 30 seconds.
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What about Skype users, Yelp and Apple downloads? What about iTunes searches? What about podcasts, webcasts and 800 TV channels? What about Pandora? This isn't to mention radio and apps like Snap Chat. How do you get a nail in a wall? You hit it over and over and over. That's what you need to do to get your name out there.
People are on all social mediums. I want to go to the medium where my customer will find me. I don't need to like it. Between me and you, I hate them all. I hate Facebook. YouTube? I rarely even look at YouTube. I don't know why people use Pinterest. Instagram is a complete waste of time. If I want pictures, I just search on Google, but it doesn't matter what I like. I've got tons of people following me on Instagram.
Does it matter whether you like Facebook or not? When Facebook started throttling, trying to get me to advertise with them -- really enforced advertising -- what did I do? I went to another medium and wrote articles, did videos on YouTube, and went to Twitter and said "Facebook is trying to choke a free man in a free country and it ain't going to happen to me. You know why? Because I'm never ever dependent upon one medium, and number two, I'm going to beat these mediums. Beat them."
I have long been a supporter of Facebook even if their name should be changed to ForceAds. I've used Facebook to reach audiences worldwide. As soon as my Facebook page reached 500,000 fans, Facebook started internally throttling the number of people that can actually see my posts. My views dropped from 350,000 in a day to 35,000 in a day and that is impossible without something going on at Facebook headquarters.
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Their attempt to force me to advertise just turns me more to other mediums. I don't need to spend money in order to have views by people that desire my content. I get tons of interaction from my YouTube channel. Facebook throttle is an opportunity for other big social mediums. Even if your business is getting throttled, keep going full throttle. What I mean by that is I didn't stop posting when Facebook began throttling me, I kept posting at full throttle -- beating it to death. So follow me today on Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Linked In, and Twitter.
Be great!
