On the wise guidance of a friend and marketing advisor, I set up a Facebook page for the editorial business. I had no idea what would occur; much did. I decided that the readership might find it interesting and entertaining.

In the process, I was required to give a street address. (Phone number was optional.) Despite choosing to keep that address private–I don’t have a physical location except for my home office–I had to go in again and make it private. Even now, I am not quite sure that FB will honor this.

It wanted a photo and a cover photo. That didn’t seem unreasonable.

FB then encouraged me to spam all my friends with requests to like the page. Having seen enough such spams in the past from friends promoting their own pages or those of their associates, I decided that my friends wouldn’t get mad at me about it. For the most part, I was right. One person whom I barely knew unfriended me, which was all right.

FB’s first attempts to sell me advertising came within an hour of creation. No joke. I suppose I may safely assume that this will be a regular occurrence.

FB tried to get me to make a post thanking all the new likers. I tried to do this three times; it never completed its process any of those times. I made my own post, which worked fine. Thanking everyone seemed very reasonable. It was pleasant to see the comments and even one recommendation, from Shawn Inmon, himself one of the most capable storytellers going–if you are not familiar with his fiction, by all means use that link. Some of his best work is non-fiction, but fiction is mainly what he does nowadays, and he does it well.

One thing I can’t seem to hide is FB’s posts encouraging me to send more spam, including to my friends. It seems not to know or care that I have already done just that. I do not think very many people would appreciate another spamming.

It tells me I have ten notifications and ten inbox posts. When I check the inbox, I have none. Notifications five, all of which already viewed and addressed, but I still have to tell the notifications that I consider myself notificated. As with normal notifications, I’ll go out on a limb here and suspect that FB doesn’t really take “okay I heard you” as the final answer.

It feels somewhat as if I have just set off the whole fireworks display at once, with notifications and such coming thick and fast. Besides the nervous feeling of not yet having full control over it all, most of it is positive. I’ll know more when the smoke clears away and I police up all the used sparklers, empty Roman candles, firecracker papers, and little mortar boxes.

Day two: page nagged me to list myself as part of the ‘team.’ I guess the idea was it would ‘build my brand.’ Being an old Kansas boy, I think of branding irons and the Rawhide theme. It also continued to rag on me to set up automated ads. These people really, really, really want some money. They want me to set up a group for the page (wonder why?). There’s a nag at the top to ‘add a button.’ Really? Button to do what? I’m afraid to push it lest it trigger a bunch of other crap. At the moment I have more than adequate FB crap to sort out.

This is a bit overwhelming. Do this, buy this, set this up, give us this, add this, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know about adding anything until I’m sure what it does. I guess this is the personality difference between reckless abandon and cautious advancement, and I’m more the latter based on all the goat rodeos in life I have seen ensue from those who just swallow and hang on. Plus, I’m obstinate. The more I feel pushed, the more I resist. The less I trust the originator (FB, insurance company, bank, car dealer), the more I resist. Here I feel pushed by a deeply distrusted source, so the default answer is No.

It is still carping at me to invite all my friends to Like the page. It seems amnesiac. I invited all my friends to Like the page as my first action after setting it up. (An amazing percentage did so. I heart you folks.) Is this all an exercise in laughing at algorithms? All, no; somewhat, yes. I’m a strange person. I reserve the right to take any indiscriminate mass broadcast as though the company CEO singled me out and said it personally. This means I hate a lot of corporations. This, I find, is my comfort zone. I am most creeped out when I find myself liking a corporation. Faceplant has little chance of ever creeping me out in that way.

Day three: more notifications and inbox red markers that, when investigated, mean nothing. Another nag to ‘boost’ my posts by buying advertising. I sense trends. It also admonished me to set up business hours, which isn’t illogical, though it is inapplicable in my case.

Day four: supposedly I have four ‘inbox’ items. I can’t believe any of these red markers. I am nagged to pressure my friends to like the page. There are some interesting statistics: I can see my total likes and follows; I can see the identities of the first but not the seconds. Right now they differ by one numerically (no, I don’t care who does which or what, except to thank all who did either; no one is obligated to like or follow a Facebook page).

It’s about time to check out page settings. I want people to have freedom to post. The default setting should always be liberty rather than restriction, after all; restriction is only for when complete liberty results in some problem. Going into settings, the first thing I find is that I have not Verified that this is my real business page. I can either scan and send them a document, or have them call me with a code. I have them call me with a code. I follow the process, but it does not work and I am told I am unverified. Okay, screw verification.

People can post without restriction, so that is good. Interesting: I can filter a given word, or engage a profanity filter. Multiple language posts are turned off; that’s no good. I have a higher than average likelihood, for an American, of someone actually posting in a foreign language, and I like it. Enabled! Except that it’s not. Or it is. It says it is not, but when I try to do fix it again, it won’t let me change it. These people are lousy at software. I’ll have to post something in a foreign language and see if it ralphs.

While I was doing that, we had another stupid ‘like’ nag. Bruce, one of my oldest friends (since I was about twelve), liked a photo. That caused FB to nag me to invite him to like the page. Cretins. Do they not suppose that he probably already does? Would Bruce love a nice little nag to do something he has surely already done? No, Bruce probably would not. Insight: if you obeyed every nag from FB, you’d hose down your business in short order. Friends will help you out, but not to the point of making their lives worse. I have one friend who has gone way overboard with this, and I definitely don’t want to be That Guy.

At the same time, many pages do nothing. I also don’t want to be That Other Guy. I should begin a procedure of attempting to post one funny, uplifting, or enjoyable thing per day. Just one. No one will unfollow me over one thing per day, one presumes, provided it is not political or negative. So I posted a music video.

Within a few hours, Zuckbook was asking $30 to ‘boost’ my post.

Day five: International Women’s Day, so I post a story. FB nags me to add a donation button. It obviously hasn’t been too early in this relationship for Zuckbook to start asking me for money, but I think five days in is too soon for me to launch a beg-a-thon. Nope.

Maybe I should describe the weird, somewhat clunky control panel one gets in order to check on the red boxes for Inbox and Notifications. I can’t tell why something would be in one and not the other, nor why. The Inbox has a nuclear symbol for automated messages (maybe it was programmed by someone laid off from Hanford), and purports to show you Messenger, comments, FB (why you would need an icon to take you to FB from FB is beyond me), and Instagram (not happening, I don’t own an Instagraph and can’t send any of them). The Notifications looks like a bigger version of the dropdown you get from the little icons at top right of FB. It’s where FB nags you to invite people to like your page, which same people you know already like it. They might like it a lot less if every interaction with it gets them a fresh trip to nag hell.

If you did everything this mechanism rags on you about, you would be broke shouting into a virtual void, because you would alienate even the people who like you independent of Zuckbook, and spend all your money buying ads from Zuck–seen by no one, because you would have driven away the audience.

Oh, and I have hit 200 likes. It nags me to create a post thanking people. My view: best way to thank them is not crap up their news feeds with stupid posts of that sort, and instead focus on posting something fun or educational or topical. For example, something for International Women’s Day. Another ad sales nag as well; this one offering me a free credit. What do you bet I wouldn’t have gotten one of those had I just plunged headlong and started buying ads? Sorry, but I don’t want to create more FB ads even if Zuck gives them to me free.

Day six: it’s time for the daily advertising sales nag! One senses that I had better get used to these. The clickable spots are positioned close to where one would normally hit X to close an unwanted dialog box. Surely this is accidental. Surely.

Day seven. Yesterday, I set my mail checker to mark anything from FB’s ad sales as spam. Since they show signs of planning to do this daily nag for an open-ended period, this will make them easier to ignore. That’s the best I can do, since the notion of getting them to cease sending this spam is problematic.

One thing I have found is that when I post a link to a blog post, and it gets shared, I get a spike in reads. I am grateful to those who do this. It’s the only way that the reach from such a page is likely to increase without drinking the FB ad cool-aid.

Day nine: now the page presents me with a banner called Page Education. It suggests that I learn ‘easy tactics’ to grow the page’s popularity, such as re-spamming my friends–all of whom already got one spam; those who didn’t ‘like’ as a result, no doubt, will be more persuaded to do so by bothering them further. They also suggest sharing it to my personal timeline. As if; one of the key objectives here was to decouple my public presentation from my private life. Another easy tactic: nag my friends to recommend my page. Yeah, because beggary is such a classy look.

Yeah, so forget those. I have a better idea: post actual content that people might enjoy.

Day ten: now it’s nagging me to set up automatic responses to new messages. As if I get such an avalanche of new PMs that I need an answering service. An automatic response is no response, and therefore only annoys; might use it when on vacation, or otherwise well away from the blog. Today must be response day because there’s also a nag to increase my response time. If I trim it down to fifteen minutes, I am told, I will get to wear a special badge. Let me guess: it’s the badge that says “I have no life except to respond to these messages.”

Naturally, there’s also a nag to get started with automated ads. Those are beginning to fade into the wallpaper for me.

Day eleven: since this was the day Facebook was borcked in most ways for most of the US daylight hours, as a side benefit, I didn’t get any nags. Either that or I am better every day at ignoring them. Now and then I’m going to repost some older posts from here. Naturally, for the much older ones, I will do some hasty editing so that I don’t have to post them with a bag over the profile picture.

I suppose it’s time to tie this up with a bow. The experience was chaotic, and felt designed to overwhelm–to inspire one to just say yes to some of the things, in order to still at least a few of the yammers. It doesn’t work on me because I have at least some technical background and have the attitude of a constipated badger when I feel pressured, but it probably works on enough people that it generates some advertising revenue.

On the positive side, there’s a moderately refined mechanism for private conversation engagement if someone PMs me. Some of the statistics are nice, even if they do turn out to be nag platforms: “This post is performing better than 75% of your other posts–Boost it for greater reach!”

At least it’ll offer a good place to post links for these.