Forbes contributor Elan Dekel goes into some detail about a problem many small and new businesses face on Facebook. If they want large numbers of likes (a few thousand) they need to pay for them by using Facebook advertising ($.27-$.57 each like) and then when they want to send a post to their new fans that they just paid Facebook to recruit they have to pay again in the $5 to $10 per thousand views range. Derek found that fewer than 3 percent of his fans were seeing his posts for organically (a term for free). To get larger numbers of a few hundred to a few thousand of his own fans, he had to pay, and though the amounts seemed small -- $5 in some cases -- the corresponding audience was small. Hippo has found that in many cases the CPM for Facebook ads can run into the $20 to $60 -- well above the $5 that Hippo charges.
Here's a link to Dekel's Forbes story. Here is another article on Facebook return on investment. More troubling to local brick and mortar businesses is that most of these examples are online. It's even hard to convert people from digital to physical.
Interestingly, Facebook has done all of this quite deliberately to, they say, improve the non-commercial aspect of Facebook. In other words, Facebook was becoming too filled with businesses' posts and Facebook wanted to dial that back. Facebook rewards viral messages from both non-businesses and businesses. If you as a business on Facebook can create content that is shared you will get a lot of free views. But this is a tall order for small small businesses.