About 4-5 years ago we released a Flash game that required to "Like our Facebook page" for a game progression. (Yes, now we know that's a bad practice but it seemed like a nice idea back then.) Anyway, we're still getting 300-500 likes a month and our Facebook page has almost 32,000 subscribers now. Real subscribers, not bots, and they're all casual gamers. This year I tried to post a couple of games released by our friends from Nemoris Games. I also gave $5 to Facebook to "promote" one post. Please see the attachments. First is paid - 5 clicks. The second is free - 0 clicks. Sure, maybe we need to create more posts or improve our marketing skills. But still: 32k page brings 964 views until you pay Facebook some money. Then you'll have 5,470 views and 5 clicks. That's just not worth it.
Yeah, we see similar things with our Facebook page. Decent stats overall, been around forever, very low interactivity without paying Facebook.
We haven't focused on our Facebook page much for these reasons. We put our game FAQ's there and players have the option to message us and complain about bugs, etc... But that's it. E-mail subscribers are the primary focus over social media.
In earlier days, fan page is more effective to connect with your fans , but now Facebook is squeezing their algorithms so that if you don't pay money, you'll get almost zero organic reach.
Just for reference: http://www.thehubcomms.com/facebook-officially-kills-organic-reach-for-brands-making-all-your-page-likes-useless/article/383759/
Exactly this. I used to be a huge proponent for creating a Facebook Fan community... now I groan whenever we talk about adding a like us through Facebook feature. Feud's page, with like 800,000 fans, gets 1000 interactions on a good post. And that's with a tv show supplying endless hijinks to add. I feel like an indie dev would have more luck elsewhere nowadays.
I've noticed the same thing too. A couple years ago Facebook pages for a developer were lively places. Now those same places feel very static with very little participation from the public.
While "not as good as it used to be" we continue to invest in Facebook as a community platform as it can be an effective space for reaching your most engaged players. However, in order to keep total interaction high you need to post frequently and you need to post unique content, so can understand it is less practical for smaller teams. Some examples of pages in our portfolio that have high engagement relative to our needs are Into the Dead https://www.facebook.com/intothedeadgame Rival Stars Basketball https://www.facebook.com/RivalStarsBasketball
those algorithms sure are evil, if you're a not paying for a long time i have noted you suddenly receive an increase in "likes" as to lure you to pay more attention to the page.