Facebook, I want my friends back
dangerousminds.net
dangerousminds.net
I would suggest just posting once a day, and using the Promoted Posts for the occasional big news that you want to make sure everyone reads.
Facebook pages isn't a panacea for brands or publishers -- not by a long shot. That panacea is one of those Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.
I do agree about the sort preference -- I wish it was sticky.
I used to click "Like" on various things in Facebook, but after starting to see them in my feed I immediately un-Liked them. I'm willing to tell my friends I like Logitech keyboards, but I'm not willing to see whatever posts the Logitech PR decides to write. If I'm interested to learn about what new keyboards/mice there are in the market, I'll find it myself, thanks.
Clicking "Like" used to be a fun, whimsical thing. Now it's been turned into a marketing vehicle (I don't fault FB for doing that), so now it's more like a "Spam me please" button. It feels like more of a business exchange rather than an expression of my preferences.
So they phrase it a bit differently. You don't subscribe, you "like." And your likes and dislikes are a part of your personality, which is something you want to share with your friends. The subscription is just a side effect of liking, and it allows marketers to use your name to spread their brand among your friends and acquaintances.
If they just called a spade a spade, it would be a disaster for them.
By people talking with each other naturally?
I don't disbelieve your assertion that you personally would find it annoying, but I know a good number of large, successful blogging brands do indeed push to social media multiple times a day, and it seems to work for them. Several of said brands have indeed published articles suggesting that publishing multiple times a day serves to boost, not diminish, your popularity.
In addition, some counter-anecdata: I don't really use Facebook, but I've certainly not found myself put off by those blogs I follow which post that often to Twitter, for example. Indeed, I think I'd find it more annoying if they reduced their posting frequency - I'm not on Twitter 24/7, and if they only linked to their posts in a single digest-style tweet, I'd probably miss it.
Now if you were to promote all those 10 posts, and 99% of your fans would see them all, then most will get annoyed. And if they don't get annoyed within the first day, they will get annoyed soon enough,
The most important metric for businesses using social media is engagement rather than raw reach, IMO.
Who isn't? :). Don't you always scroll the timeline down until you find a post you've read when checking Facebook last time? I certainly do.
It does depend upon the page, though. If your posts get high engagement, it will have higher distribution. Of the author's 55k fans, only 14k fans are "talking about" the page, so they'll have less than full distribution. To be frank, their posts are not getting many likes. Thus, my recommendation to just do one great post per day. Also, I would suggest to the author to experiment with photos and not just links with photos. Facebook's push toward bigger photos in the feed is no accident -- they work.
There are definitely brands that have multiple posts per day, and it's largely because of the high engagement their posts drive. Two examples that I follow are "I Fucking Love Science" and "Humans of New York." They both have fewer fans than talking about, and both post multiple times a day. Because their content is highly shared, it gets great distribution. It also depends on your own engagement with the page too, as I understand it.
The best practice I hear about Twitter is to indeed publish multiple times a day. Because it acts more as a true feed and not a digest, repeating the same content at a different hour is considered to be good.
Besides that, Facebook is not the channel for you to get that ammount of data to your users. Facebook is a SOCIAL network, not a brand catalog. If they let that abusive behavior happen freely(sorry, but 16 posts a day is abusive behavior at least to me) their own product would be defaced.
They're hacks and cheats. There are other ways they could have done this.
For people who don't use RSS, or want a consolidated feed of "all the things my friends are doing" plus "all the articles this place has posted today to their Facebook feed", 10-16 posts a day isn't any more overwhelming than, say, an RSS Feed from Techdirt with 10-16 posts a day.
You can STILL see posts of your favorite bands by going to their pages, which is how you used to have to find updates: by checking for them. The Newsfeed is new, and it's not a right.
And then, one day, I stopped seeing posts from lots of people, including many of the people I most wanted to see posts from. It took a while before I even realized this was happening. Then I slowly had to go through and fix the settings for people to tell FB that "yes, really, show me all the posts". And, still, every couple of days Facebook forgets that I've set my sort to "Most Recent" and goes back to "Top Stories" and not showing me everything. This gets tiresome, to say the least.
This is by far the most annoying thing for me. That and the likelihood that most people don't realize that setting is there, and assume they're getting posts in chronological order.
EDIT: my solution, btw, is to make a bunch of my friends "close friends" and set Facebook to send me email notifications for updates from them. Bypasses the newsfeed, brings it back to email, where I like it.
And if any brand is overwhelming the newsfeed, it becomes pretty easy to make the decision to unlike their page
Facebook makes a lot of decisions for you. It's a free service, so it's their prerogative. If you don't like it, you can always deactivate your account like I did.
...and he can also gripe about it in a public forum in the hopes that if enough people do so, Facebook will change it's behavior. It wouldn't be the first time FB changed their policies due to grumbling users.
You have to be delusional to believe that Facebook will change the functionality of a major feature because of a few people who are complaining about it on Hacker News.
When the user's perceived value received falls short of their perceived risk of releasing personal information, they should rightly be upset. And probably quit.
But in terms of brands using Facebook, I'm not sure the same contract applies. They get valuable exposure using the infrastructure, but contribute nothing of value to Facebook. I have a hard time believing ordinary users would complain if all brand pages were suddenly dropped. Those users would continue to share branded content organically if they so desired. I don't believe that a one-sided beneficiary has much room to complain at all.
If your business model is selling shit given to you for free, you'll have to find a new way to make money once your source changes his mind. One way to enter into a mutually beneficial contract is to purchase ads (or promoted posts). If they cost too much, then they've lost your business. But they never really had it in the first place...
That's a funny way to characterize a SaaS service. They make service decisions for you all the time. Don't like Timeline? Too bad. Want the 2007 version instead of the current one? Too bad.
A Software as a Service service?
Consider why Facebook doesn't have a "more" button for users tired of staring at the same Facebook filtered posts. Because that would be giving users what the want without charging anyone. (Even the recent posts sort - a hidden option - doesn't seem to work anymore)
This is extortion and anti-user. No bones about it. Users requested this information in their feed and it would be trivial to give it to them. It's fine to filter, but not fine to not allow unfiltering.
The only right you have is to control content on your own pages, for the most part, not what other people see in their Newsfeeds. If you thought about it for even a SECOND you'd realize that's exactly how it should be and that what these people are arguing for is for self-serving reasons only.
It really is a bait and switch and I'm surprised there isn't MORE outrage about it.
Guess what: Facebook owns their site, their servers, and their PR mechanisms. It's up to them what things to charge for, how to control the distribution of information that you put on their servers, etc. If someone doesn't like it, they can pay to set up their own social network.
Edit: Oh, and "bait and switch" isn't really accurate. You aren't Facebook's customer. You're just a user. You agreed to let them change their services without your consent when you signed up for your account.
First, let's unpack your justification a little – you actually offer two claims: 1) You aren't Facebook's customer. You're just a user. and 2) You agreed to let them change their services without your consent when you signed up for your account.
To the first: most of us may not be their customers, but there's clearly an exchange of value going in both directions. I give them my attention, demographic information, etc. which is valuable to them as it then allows them to charge their customers for access to me and my info, in all the various ways. In return, I get access to FB and all that goes with it... but I'm not just a user I'm a supplier. As such, there's still an agreement, both formal and informal, going on here.
The formal agreement is the one you allude to in your second claim – the TOS that most of us don't remember even agreeing to. That matters a lot from a legal standpoint. They're clear to do whatever they want, legally, within reason. (I'm not trying to go deep on this sub-point).
But much more important is the informal agreement between FB and their suppliers (err "users"). That's the stuff that brand equity is made up of – and the brand promise, the value to users is the ability to keep up with their friends and know that their friends can keep up with them.
FB has begun to renege on that promise – and as such, they'll lose brand equity and the value in the eyes of their users.
Call it a bait and switch or don't, but the effect is still the same.
Unfortunately, you're neither of those two. If you have an account on Facebook, you're their product.
A lot of the disappointment here seems to be a result of ignoring this relation.
The problem is that the market is flooded with suppliers so we have very little individual leverage, but we do have the choice to leave the market. Done en masse, it could well change the dynamics of the equation.
Still, my point is that supplier is the accurate term. Unless of course you mean to say that FB is in the business of human trafficking.. then, well... um..
I can understand people who use Facebook personally feeling overwhelmed when its features keep changing, though I still think they ought to realize that they don't own their Facebook pages or the content on them, and talk and act accordingly.
But a business using Facebook for PR, such as the OP of this thread, ought to understand that they are taking advantage of a service, and if the cost of using that service becomes greater than the benefit, they should look for another source for that service.
Businesses, on the other hand, are a less gray area, IMHO, and I'd say I agree completely with what you've written here.
On a ranting note, this attitude is incredibly offensive to the users of social networks and SaaS providers; and I'm stunned to see it met with so much traction on a community of startup owners. If your startup is this cavalier towards customers, you're doing it wrong.
If you are a person who actually complains about Facebook's actions, then I disagree that without people like you, they don't have a site. Most users/customers don't appear to complain at all; they just keep using FB and adapting to the changes and never even think about the longer-term consequences. If all the people who actually are complaining now up and leave, FB will still have plenty of users/customers.
The only way that will change is if lots of users/customers start to believe that the costs of using FB outweigh the benefits. And the only way that will change is if people who can actually find or build alternatives, like the owners of businesses that make heavy use of the Internet, lead the way.
> If your startup is this cavalier towards customers, you're doing it wrong.
So, basically, you're saying Facebook is doing it wrong. Please tell Mark Zuckerberg, not me.
[Edit: added the below.]
> So, yeah, I'm their customer. I'm what makes their site a viable business.
I should probably unpack a little why I object to the word "customer" in this context. I agree that a customer doesn't have to "pay" in money; any exchange of value for value will do for that aspect of it.
But a customer knows the price of what he is buying. Facebook doesn't set a price on your usage of the site; you just use it. That means you and Facebook can't exchange price signals to optimize the exchange of value; you send plenty of "signals" to Facebook as part of your usage of the site, but those signals optimize their exchange of value with advertisers and marketers, not with you.
Economically speaking, this is the root cause of the problems the OP is complaining about; he has to post his complaint on his blog because he has no way of influencing FB the way a real customer would, through his purchasing behavior. (Except, of course, for the very crude option of "stop using the site altogether", which is the one I would favor. If enough people actually do that, FB might be motivated to look for ways to make its users into real customers instead of pseudo-customers. But I wouldn't hold my breath.)
Unless you pay the vig. Spam away as long as Zuck gets a taste.
You can't have it both ways.
--
Uh huh. "Mom & Pop business" seems to be the new "won't somebody please think of the children" line designed to extinguish all rational thought. I'm getting a little tired of it.
(I'll save my rant on why I think most Mom & Pop businesses should be out of business for another day. I have to say I'm amused when I see a restaurant in my neighborhood apply a bunch of signs that say "absolutely no laptop use" and then go out of business a month later. Idealism is a bitch.)
Sounds like someone's bitter that their free marketing channel dried up, and they have to make actual decisions about how to fill their pipeline back, beyond just posting on facebook.
In particular, the best restaurants in the world are small, not chains. Chains are always mediocre by their very nature. Unlike in software, which can be replicated and exported perfectly, restaurants are about their chefs, something you cannot easily replicate and export. Even small finer dining chains vary hugely by location.
So are the worst.
My point is that it's illogical to "think most [small businesses] should be out of business". By their continued existence and success we can see first hand that they deserve to be in business. There are even really high end and successful places that ban cell phones and still do well. Sometimes places do well because of quirks like these. Other times not. There are many variables.
The market behaves as it does, despite what anybody thinks it should do.
Or they're being given unbalanced treatment. The market is not perfectly rational; many people (whether customers, suppliers or employees) seem willing to give more to small businesses and expect less in return.
No he didn't say hope all, he said most should.
The local hardware store opens at 9:00am. Or 9:30. Or whenever pop finishes his breakfast. Because whatever I have planned for the day is not nearly as urgent as his crossword puzzle. That shit doesn't happen at Home Depot.
When I am traveling, I will go to Starbucks, but in my city, I know where the exceptional coffee is.
edit: s/privacy/quality
1: And that's not even true. Amazon (the physical bit, at least) have outstanding service. Whenever a shipment doesn't show up, they refund it, no questions asked, even though it shows ask being delivered at my office address (presumably lost between the reception and me). They've sent me two new Kindles, not literally no questions asked, because they did ask, and I admitted to having broken it myself by accident - they just didn't seem to care about the answer. Pret-a-Manger (a sandwich chain in London) has consistently blazingly fast service and unwavering cheery staff.
Actually? Quite a few. I despise Comcast. I despise the big-4 cell phone companies (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint). I despise the oil companies (BP, Chevron, Texaco, et. al). Notice a pattern? Despite my (and presumably many others) despising these companies, they are all enormously profitable. I think Facebook has got to the state where they at least think they have a monopoly on their users' social graphs and are willing to raise access prices sky-high. I'm not surprised it happened. I'm surprised it took this long.
I believe most of the others are.
The more salient characteristic of these companies is that they 1) dominate their respective markets (as monopolies or one of a small number of oligopolistic suppliers), and 2) are spectacularly unresponsive to customer/user sentiments.
"We don't care, we don't have to. We're the Phone Company".
Check. Most people can't be bothered to maintain a presence on more than two social networks. So Facebook, Twitter (and in a distant third place) Google Plus have a de-facto oligolopoly on users' ad viewing. And given Facebook's enormous userbase, it's not exactly convenient for users to switch away, due to network effects.
>2) are spectacularly unresponsive to customer/user sentiments.
Every change Facebook has made lately has been vociferously opposed by its userbase, usually because it erodes privacy and reduces the perceived level of control that people have over the broadcast of their status updates.
>"We don't care, we don't have to. We're the Phone Company".
Replace "Phone Company" with Facebook and that may as well be a paraphrase of Mark Zuckerberg.
I'd be angry if I'd given Facebook money under the old system only for them to change the value of what I got from them. The basic takeaway is that the rules that were in place where I might be willing to pay $2 for a like - a person who likes your page sees your post - had to be changed because there wasn't that much user attention in existence. Now it's been inflated to be worth about a tenth as many views, which is what you were buying, only Facebook called it a "Like" and it somehow means something completely different now.
I guess the moral of the story is don't invest in anything whose value can be arbitrarily changed by someone else.
You built a business inside someone's shopping mall, they started charging rent, so you complain. And at $4 CPK for promoted posts[1], you'll find FB advertising to be slightly cheaper.
[1] CPK aka CPM aka cost per 1000 views. Calculated from: To reach 100% of of our 50k+ Facebook fans they’d charge us $200 per post. Edit: $200 / 50 = $4, thanks Ryan.
Another in a long, long list of customers whose plans fall apart when a free or one-price-for-life service realizes it cannot continue with business as usual. Today's pro tip: Do not build your livelihood around a third-party's free service. Eventually that service will either 1.) shut down, 2.) kick you out of their ecosystem, or 3.) start charging you.
I'm not sure what is more surprising: that people continue to build businesses with these Achilles heels or that they seem shocked when the third-party changes the game.
What really frustrates me is that I'm missing entirely non commercial messages from my actual friends. I've missed posts from my girlfriend for godssake, it's ridiculous.
I understand that they need to make money, but the entire reason I and others are on facebook is to connect with our friends. Facebook needs to allow us to do that and then augment our experience with monied options, not imply that most of your friends will never see your posts unless you open up.
Don't make me go back to email. It's still there, waiting, full of delicious SMTP guaranteed delivery.
>I used to get a great deal from using Facebook—but I understood it to be a two-way reciprocal arrangement because I was driving traffic back to Facebook as well, and reinforcing their brand awareness with prominent widgets on our blog
"Had Facebook debuted the Promote “option” with a more reasonable rate card that would apply to frequently updated blogs and media outlets—something akin to “book rate” at the post office—we’d have been willing to pay between $7 to $10 a post."
They're basically haggling about the price.
He want control of his fans, his like-ees. Not his (Facebook) "friends". Most of us know that is not a bug but a feature.
Now the problem that Facebook makes it to share one's email address with one's own real Facebook friends is annoying and something to complain about. But trying to leverage that to complain about not being able to push your feed is problematic. This is exactly what use Facebook for. An experience where you aren't bombarded with everyone's BS.
Facebook: Oh, definitely. Just have a look at your NewsFeed and see what they're doing.
User: Wait, I've got 2000 friends. Why am I only getting a NewsFeed post twice an hour?
Facebook: Because we decided that's the information that you're most likely to want.
User: But what if I want to know what everyone's doing at any specific moment?
Twitter: Can I be of assistance?
User: Oh, hello Twitter.
IPOs/monetization/capitalism has far more power than the user-base.
I'd love to see a bunch of not-for-profit[1] startups to come along to replace the likes of paypal/twitter/stripe/etc.
1. For example, supported by just enough injected advertising to break even, or fees set at a percentage that just covers costs rather than going after piles of profit.
My point, though, was that they're making the product worse. The lack of a creative business model to monetize a user base while keeping the quality of the product high is disheartening. These are some of the best minds in consumer internet - which doesn't give me high hopes for consumer internet.
This is why I don't like many pages, and it's why FB needs clear and easy to use controls for what does or doesn't show up on my wall.
I only have 300,000 likes too. ;-) Basically, the trick is engagement. Give the audience what they want, when they want. Timing matters, pictures matter. Do it right, and you don't need to pay anything.
P.S. Making money from advertisements, pfft how ancient and boring! shamelessplug use Teespring instead.
Then there was a Newsfeed. Then it showed more than just wall posts. Then there were TOO MANY things on it, so they scaled it back. The Newsfeed was an experiment, and it worked, but it needed tweaking. That's why this happened.
That they now allow you to pay to promote is secondary to the original origin of why the Newsfeed works like it works. I'm glad to have the option to pay to promote and I'm glad larger fan bases need to pay more. Now, when I have something legitimate to announce, I can pay to do it. When I just want to engage, I better engage well or else I'll get buried. GOOD!
Sure they had to scale it back, but the conflict of interests is real. People don't necessarily want to see only posts from those who are willing to pay. It's not that I begrudge them the opportunity to make money, but I think this clearly weakens Facebook's usefulness to users.
It's one thing if Facebook is filtering to show me the posts with the most organic engagement in order to decrease noise in my feed. It's completely different if some of the pages I follow have very little chance of reaching me based solely on their inability or unwillingness to pay for access. OA hyperbole notwithstanding, I think Facebook are overreaching here.
It's not sustainable for Facebook to degrade the usefulness of their service in this way for a short-term cash gain. 15-20% throughput to fans is so low as to confound expectations, and I'm saying this will bite them ass.
My understanding was that this doesn't work so well anymore. I think paid promotion should be a way of boosting the visibility of content, but definitely not at the expense of content that would have spread virally if it wasn't artificially limited.
"See what we can do for you? See the traffic we can drive and link to you? Want more? Choose your level of traffic, choose your price."
The article makes the assumption that 3rd-party businesses that have been suckling at the teat of the social graph are the value to the facebook users. They're not. The users, the actual people are - businesses are just there to help pay for the whole thing, and follow the personal users. I say this as a business owner who uses facebook heavily, and occasionally pays them for the right to get a little bit back out of them.
I've yet to see a single person in my timeline say "I'd stop coming to facebook if all of these businesses didn't have pages here."
Using your blog or whatever to make specious (I assume) arguments about what someone else should/should not be doing with their business is your prerogative. Just don't expect people to actually listen to what you're saying while you beat them over the head with ads for trucks and cooking shows.
Again, I didn't read the whole thing, or even half before I bailed. But am I wrong in assuming this site uses the popular activity of Facebashing(tm) as a ploy to shove ads at unsuspecting visitors?
That perspective actually gives me increased hope for Tent (https://tent.io), the decentralized social networking protocol that could one day be a Facebook alternative. When Tent was announced here on HN, a common criticism was that if you're popular, and you host your Tent server yourself, you end up paying a lot for the bandwidth cost of sending each post to thousands or millions of followers. Whereas the perception is that on a centralized social network you can send a post to millions of followers for free.
For now, that's still the case on Twitter, but on Facebook, apparently not. If you really want significant reach, you pay to publish even to people who already (by liking) signed up to follow you. So the situations aren't actually that different. I guess there really is no free lunch.
The add supported model is terrible for social networks and needs to go. If you can afford a computer, smartphone, etc. Then you can pay 5-20$/year for an account.
Free limited accounts for people <18 years old, which have limited access to adult content? (Idea, but may work to both hook future customers, and protect kids)
Facebook has a level of PR software as service which is free. They have another which is premium. If a company wants to spam their "fans," they have to pay.
If a business wants to have a high level of control over communications with it's fans, customers, likers, or whatever they are called, there's no free lunch. Either pay a third party (e.g. Facebook) or invest the hard work.
I run a nonprofit alumni association here in Boston and I use FB as a way to update alumni of changes in events so that we can limit the numbers of emails we send. We were using Facebook as sort of an information platform and don't profit or make any money in any way.
I am very careful to not post too much, even entering in to specific agreements with the national alumni association so that they do not to post ads on our page for their merchandise etc.
What am I supposed to do now? Should I pay out of my pocket to reach users who definitely want to be reached already?
Facebook provides a great service, and they should be compensated, but I will now have to look at other options to potentially reach our group.
--- And the flip side of this is that I would like to see posts from everyone I am friends with that I haven't explicitly blocked from my feed, going through all those names to re-add them seems like an amazing amount of trouble for me.
--- The OP is hard to sympathize with, but he/she has a good point.
I don't begrudge FB trying to monetize their service. It's just that their service isn't what most people seem to be using it for. Thus their paid options will seem like bizarre value propositions to the average user.
Am I looking at this wrong?
The guy who spams 30 lame political memes per day, who I might argue with a couple times a week, gets treated like my best friend. My mom, who posts maybe once a month and has a limited friends list, gets hidden away in the deep recesses of the system.
"Close" was a loaded word to use. Facebook knows how often you interact with someone's content, how often you view someone's profile, how closely connected your social network is with someone, etc. Facebook's algorithm is working for people, which I think is a valid counter to the folks who think all their posts should show up for all of their friends.
It has. Yes, all of the relevant family connections are listed (my parents, my 7 siblings, and myself form a complete graph[0].) It's not just my mother, either -- a few wedding photos of a family member, posted today, didn't show up in my main news feed (which I always set to chronological rather than top stories, and which I check several times per day.) The photos should have been at the "n hours ago" point in the list, but I only discovered them because I was searching for examples for this thread. (I thought the missing post from my mom was a better example, though.)
FaceBook's algorithm seems to work for some people, particularly those with particular usage patterns. But its failure modes can be quite obnoxious. They provide some tools that allow some degree of fine-tuning, but even having manually set the "show me everything" options, certain content falls through the cracks.
Being the "product" gives you a great position in your relationship with the company and incentivizes them to treat you very well.
Fact of the matter is, and is as demonstrably evident, FB can cares much less about keeping this advertiser happy than about keeping its users happy.
I think this comparison is valid, but realize that most people are not a Lebron James or a Justin Bieber and they have very little ability to influence a company directly. In fact, for record labels and the NBA, there have been numerous examples of smaller players getting a bad deal or being screwed over. Being a user or consumer of a service does not mean that the service provider is looking to treat you well.
Maybe the "product meme" is misleading, but i think that the "customer" label is also misleading.
What is Facebook paying me for the content they are selling advertising against? Is the ability to access their service my compensation?
just for the wrong reason.
And you are wrong also, by the way, the Facebook product we are talking about right now is the ATTENTION of the users, not the users themselves. They CAN sell users... but that's not what the feed does.
I told you all of that to tell you this... Facebook needs to sell a high quality product.
Now the author's assertion is that he should be allowed to lower the quality of Facebook's product because it should be his right. I'm not sure I agree with that.
Hasn't happened yet, from what I can see.
As a user, if my friends post something I want to see it. If my daughter's karate school or my favorite band posts something, I want to see it. If they're spammy, I'll unsubscribe. I would like to make this decision for myself, not have it made for me. If it has to be made for me, I would prefer it be made based on some approximation of relevance and quality, not because someone paid $5 to spam me with it.
As an advertiser, Facebook has consistently promoted ads as a way to build a following via the 'like' button. So I pay Facebook to gain exposure to build a following of 10,000 fans and now I have to pay again if I want to reach them all?? Classic bait and switch. I wonder how many past advertisers would have paid to build up their 'likes' if they had been told very clearly up front "Just because someone likes your page does not mean they will see your posts in their news feed".
There's a disconnect between what you think "Like" should be, what Facebook thinks "Like" should be and what the user thinks "Like" should be.
I never saw "Like" as being akin to signing up for a mailing list. Certainly not to the extent that I would be spammed with however many posts per day each "Liked" service serves up. It seems like Facebook agrees with me. I think they made a reasonable decision here for the good of the end-user.
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14404
His conclusion? Not Facebook
x) Disallow users from merely being a fan of the page, instead replacing that with "like"
x) Now make it so businesses can post to their page and the post shows up in the newsfeed for those who like the page. Previously only friend updates were shown. So liking a page has the side effect of getting spam by the company.
x) Facebook has now successfully facilitated spam, which is necessary for
x) Their new spam-prevention algorithm, leading to the end goal:
x) Now that Facebook has facilitated spam and we accept limited posts, the antispam filter can be circumvented by paying Facebook.
Voila, Facebook is now the post office, and spammers pay the post office to bulk spam you. Imagine if you went to local businesses and said, "Hi, I like you guys", that resulted in spam to your snailmail mailbox. You said, "Cut that out, that's wrong." So they fixed the problem they created, but now that the businesses are hooked, they can charge them for the ability to send out spam.
Facebook could easily make it so users are in charge of their filter, but this is counter to how Facebook wants to make money, so the UI is horrid for this and no one does this in practice. Imagine a UI where users rank friends of order of importance, with an easy UI, and the most important friends of mine are the ones who I am more likely to see. O wait, I have just described g+. Facebook will never have such an intuitive interface("close friend" is horrid), where you the burden of filtering is put on the user. Facebook wants to control that filter.
Eventually it will get to the point where you don't even need to like a page, you will get spam from the highest bidder, decided by auction. One of the main purposes of 'like' was to get users accepting communication from companies, once that was done, then they went in to monetize the link, before that it was just friend to friend chit chat, which doesn't pay the bills.
That's about my consumption. On the other end, I have a friend, an artist with 5,000+ friends. He told me that the engagement on his posts dropped drastically, from like 200-300 'likes' per photo to something like 20 earlier this year, and as such he's considering not bothering to use the site any longer. Apparently Facebook thinks those people aren't interested in his content? Or they want him to start paying. That isn't going to happen.
What follows is speculation, but it's easy to imagine that out of a total fanbase, only a certain percentage "catch" your post while it's fresh, before it's buried behind newer stuff coming in from the ever-increasing number of pages people like. While it may have been the case that back in the day the response one got from posting something on a facebook page was much better than it is now, it's also true that facebook was never as popular as it is today and that users' newsfeeds were never as busy as they are now. And as people subscribe to multiple publishers and their attention gets diluted, you can't expect their engagement with all of these pages to remain at pre-growth levels (or grow).
There's another twist to this. Too many posts from pages thumping activity from friends may alienate users. How do you balance these two types of information? Someone's going to get less airtime, and since (I assume) the bulk of posts comes from pages, they get silenced based on whether or not you interacted with them recently and whatever other criteria facebook can come up with. Same for friends you don't care much for.
Whether or not facebook can be more transparent with regards to how it determines which posts to show and which to hide is another issue. Does the average Joe care? Will he mess things up if given controls that are too advanced? Note that Facebook doesn't censor information, it merely filters what you see by default. You can still go to individual pages or profiles and see their full activity.
There also seems to be a backlash against any commercial endeavour facebook may have. "Facebook is selling your information!" - is it? where can I buy this information? is it really selling in the sense that most people would understand? No. But that's the term that is being used. "Facebook is making people pay for airtime!" well, kinda. Personally I think that should be "Facebook is making people pay for ADDITIONAL airtime" for all the reasons stated above. Maybe they got into this mess due to poor communication but I don't buy the "broken on purpose" argument. That's against facebook's interest in the long term.
I don't mean to defend facebook, just bring into discussion the potential complexities behind developments which people tend to imply are malicious.
For example, if my Crossfit box posts a new WOD everyday, I would greatly prefer to have that in my news feed rather than having to go search out the fan page again. I could have just gone to their actual web site.
It would be very nice if you could use the search box to search on your news feed posts. If I could quickly do a search for the Crossfit box and get to the daily post.... awesomesauce!
IIRC there was previously a "see only important messages from this person" choice and it was better.
I will say, if your posts show up so frequently in my stream, I will unlike your page. Facebook is definitely saving you from a lot of unlikes. Facebook is not Twitter - it's baby pictures from your friends.
I trust Facebook to control what to display to me MORE than I trust advertisers to post only things I would be interested in. That they can pay money ($200?) to get it there, that filters it too. They'll only pay for interesting stuff presumably. So thank the Lord Facebook pages don't get to control my stream directly.
But who knows what special sauce is in FB algos. If I were them I would certainly distinguish between companies, news/blogging, musician/art and image macro posters. Those all have very different usages and annoyance levels.
Probably the interaction rate is factored in, but that also gets spread thinner and thinner. Obviously God and George Takei are winning the game, so the game isn't unwinnable.
Facebook is a company, it's not a democracy asking their users what they should do. They can destroy their business if the want to, and your responsibility as a customer is go and look somewhere else to signify that their new rules do not work for you anymore.
Reasonable? No way.
Do we as business and individuals really want to pay to promote our content AND be sold to advertisers AND build their network at the same time?
I've got friend who "like" companies on Facebook to get discounts and such, but when I've talked to them that's been pretty much the full extent of the interaction—basically a new-style email list that gives them occasional discounts. But is that essential to the survival of most businesses? I'm on FB to connect with my friends, I simply would never even consider "liking" 90% of the companies/products I buy. I don't need constant updates from the company that makes my tires, or my jacket, or the vast majority of mundane stuff that makes up the world.
The first company that comes to mind when I think of recently successful marketing is Apple, and do they use social media marketing at all? They seem very old school, with traditional TV spots and billboards that show you the product and what you'd use it for.
This statement is probably a bit of a stretch even in 2012.
This isn't Facebook scamming you - it's simply that 100% of your fans don't check 100% of your posts 100% of the time.
A few years ago Facebook had a feature where you could weight your friends' from 1-10 and that would affect your feed. Now you can just limit by "only important updates" and such. It's not really clear what that even means.
FB's job is to keep the average user (who won't put much effort into sanitizing their wall whatever they clicked on in the past) happy while getting enough money out of their userbase as a whole to stay in business and keep the stockholders happy. It's not their job to keep the promotors who use FB as a tool happy.
The story here is now that Facebook is willing to be paid by brands to degrade the news feed experience for their users :)
Best part is, the only way to change this is to shut it off for each individual friend - not exactly convenient.
$75 for a 17-30K user reach is $0.0044 per user or less.
I actually think that's a good deal if you're announcing a new product or important product update.
1. Advertisers 2. Real users 3. Social media marketing scum
If they think most users would prefer not to see 10 posts per day after accidentally clicking a like button, then they're probably going to do that.
Can't really do anything here other than sigh and shake head.