Twelve Dollars and a Test About Facebook

I’m running a little experiment this week.

I want to tell you about it while it’s happening, not after. That way you can watch it with me.

I spent twelve dollars on Facebook. Three dollars a day for four days. It’s spread across five of my posts.

Facebook calls it a boost. You pay, and they show your post to more people than would see it on their own.

Now, twelve dollars isn’t much. It won’t make me famous. That’s not the point.

The point is to get an answer to a question. And the only way to get some answers is to go buy them.

Here’s the question. Does paying Facebook turn into real readers? Or does it just turn into little thumbs-up signs that don’t mean anything?

There’s a second question riding along behind the first one. If I pay for a few days, does Facebook start treating my regular posts better? Do the free ones get shown to more people afterward?

Facebook says no. They’ve said for years that paid and free run on separate tracks. Paying for one doesn’t help the other.

Plenty of folks who run pages swear it does. They say the machine notices who’s paying and rewards them.

I don’t know who’s right. And I’ve learned not to take anybody’s word on a thing I can check myself. So I’m checking.

Here’s how I set it up. I told Facebook I wanted website visitors. Not likes. Not comments. People who actually click through and come read.

That choice matters more than most folks know. If you tell Facebook you want likes, it goes and finds people who like things. Those people tap a button and keep scrolling. They never read a word.

Then I’ve got my own counter on my website. It’s not run by Facebook. It doesn’t care whether I paid anybody. It just counts who walks in the door.

That’s important, too. When you pay somebody, you shouldn’t let them be the only one keeping score. Facebook grades its own homework. I wanted a second set of eyes.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. And it happened before the experiment even got going.

Early this morning, my website counter lit up. Visitors from Facebook jumped way up, about twenty times what I’d seen a few hours before.

And I’ll be honest with you. My first thought was, well, look at that. The money’s working.

My AI helper thought the same thing. It looked at the numbers and said the boost had kicked in.

Then I pulled up Facebook’s own report. Every one of the five ads read zero dollars spent. Nobody reached. Nothing delivered.

The money hadn’t moved yet. Not one penny.

So that rush of visitors had nothing to do with the boost. It was my regular sharing, doing what it does on a Sunday morning.

Think about how easy that would’ve been to get wrong. The timing lined up perfect. The story made sense. And it was dead wrong.

If I’d stopped looking right there, I’d have told you the boost was a success. I’d have believed it myself. I might have spent more money on the strength of it.

That’s the real lesson of this whole week. And I got it before the test even started.

When two things happen close together, it’s natural to think one caused the other. Our brains are built that way. We want the story to fit.

But close together isn’t the same as cause and effect. You have to check. You have to look at the second set of books.

This goes way past Facebook ads. It goes straight to how you use AI.

These machines are very good at telling a story that fits. They’ll look at your numbers and hand you a reason. And the reason will sound right.

Sometimes it is right. Sometimes it’s just the closest story that fits. The machine doesn’t always know the difference, and it won’t always tell you.

That’s why you keep your own count. That’s why you check the other report. That’s why you don’t let one source be both the player and the referee.

So here’s what I’m watching for the rest of the week.

First, how many people actually come to my website from the paid posts. I’ll check that against my own counter every day.

Second, what twelve dollars buys me in real readers. I’ll divide the money by the people who walked in, and that gives me my cost per reader.

Third, what happens to my regular, unpaid posts. I wrote down how many people they reach on a normal day before any money ran. I’ll watch them during the boost. Then I’ll watch them for a week after.

That third one is the tell. If my free posts get a bump while the money runs, then drop right back when it stops, that’s not better treatment. That’s a meter running. It means Facebook is waiting for me to pay again.

If they hold steady or climb, then maybe the page folks are right. Maybe the machine does pay attention.

I’ll tell you what I find either way. Good or bad, I’ll put it out here where you can see it.

I don’t have a stake in the answer. I’m not trying to sell you on Facebook. I’m not trying to talk you out of it either.

I just want to know. And I think you might want to know, too.

Because a lot of you are paying for things online. Ads, subscriptions, AI tools, all of it. And most of the time, the only report you get comes from the people you’re paying.

Twelve dollars is cheap tuition for learning how to check them.

So come back Thursday. We’ll see what the money did. And we’ll see what it didn’t.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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