The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook
time.com
time.com
It would be one thing if they were charging all along, or made that intention clear. Instead they took all the free marketing and slowly scaled down how many of your fans saw your posts (frog in boiling water?). It's to the point now where I have pages that reach .1% of my fans. Facebook now wants thousands of dollars for just ONE post to reach a significant portion (not even all) of my fan base.
Ultimately, I don't think Facebook had a choice. The user experience, with the amount of pages some people like, would be horrendous. But to spend any time or money to try to build a fan page on Facebook now would be a joke. Anyone currently spending their advertising dollars to buy likes on Facebook is terribly misinformed on the impact it will have (none).
Additionally, it seems many of the major brands I've seen advertising via print, TV, etc. have been only promoting their Twitter accounts now. I have to assume this is a reaction to Facebook burning them and now they are trying to make Twitter a larger threat to Facebook.
If someone doesn't like the content from a Page they follow, they should unfollow it: I specifically follow the things I do because I want to see their content... it does not improve the user experience to limit that content; if anything, it destroys the user experience, as the reason I go to Facebook is to see the content from the people and brands I like: showing me less of the stuff I like leaves me disappointed and unsatisfied.
That said, I think a key issue here is that I feel these algorithms are "solving the wrong problems"... if a friend is using some game and keeps posting from from it, everyone needs to realize that isn't the game's fault: that friend is choosing to post that stuff as they actually care about that game. They hope--they might even expect--that people are seeing that content: if your friend is spam, maybe you should unfollow your friend (Facebook thankfully now lets you do this without unfriending them, which might have political consequences ;P).
This is important, as if a different person were playing that same game, the importance of the content might be fundamentally different: there are people in my life whom I would love to see those silly game posts from, to the point where it would make my day to see the games being played: if nothing else, I would know they are still alive and active (if maybe wasting their time and energy ;P).
This is true if everything, not just games, and frankly seems to come down to pretty simple use cases: use cases that I would be shocked if it turned out most people didn't share. I have one friend that loves taking photographs, and they all kind of suck; I have another whose photographs are downright awe inspiring: I want to follow the photos from the second one, and not the first. I don't want more of the second and fewer of the first, I don't want the Photos app itself to be judged somehow "this guy seems to like photos more than games", I just want to see the second guy's photos and not the first (and maybe the first guy's gaming, and not the second's ;P).
I say this is a common use case, as I swear everyone I know complains about similar issues: I have a friend who, despite having marked his wife as "Close Friend", misses content she posts (something I didn't believe, until I had it happen to me as well: some kinds of content isn't considered relevant enough for a notification even if you insist that all that user's content is relevent). I have another who only uses Facebook to post links and photos, and most people I talk to love her links but don't care about her photos (especially in one particular album: it would be great to be able to mark someone "Close Friend" and then unfollow one album ;P).
I thereby end up returning to what I had said in my previous comment: I followed the pages I do because I liked their content... because I wanted to see more of their content... because that content made me happy. If that content doesn't make me happy, I want to think I'm responsible enough to unfollow the page, and I want to believe I live in a world where others are also capable of this.
I also do not think any algorithm is going to figure this out automatically: I follow the page of a movie that posts quotes and screengrabs from the film. Like the comics in a newspaper, these snippets are a familiar and beneficial part of my perusal of Facebook: they are part of what I enjoy about visiting the website. I never comment on the screengrabs, nor do I "like" them (I would rather others not know what sappy parts of the sappy movie I'm most connecting with today ;P)... I'm not even clicking them... I have no clue how Facebook would ever figure out I want to see those, all of those, if it is going to insist on ignoring my explicit "I want to follow this Page" request :(.
I've been doing some of this lately, but initially I did not follow most of my current likes because I wanted to see their content. Most of them are not things I ever explicitly "liked"! Facebook used to have areas of your profile where you listed your favorite movies, favorite bands, etc. At some point these got converted into follows of pages, without me opting in. When I said that I liked the band Coil, whose principals are now dead, I did not thereby imply that I intended to follow some profiteering asshole who controls their Facebook "Page". And yet that's what happened. I do unfollow these when they show up in my feed with objectionable content. But I think it's a mistake to assume that people want to see the content from the Pages they "follow" (admittedly, a mistake of Facebook's own making).
To be honest, I think everyone is just crying that "Facebook isn't showing my fans the stupid and unengaging crap that I post". How about trying some actual content that your fans might actually want to see? The one thing FB has become very adept at is filtering out crap.
If you post crap, users won't want to see your crap - would you want to see crap?
I agree with your post wholeheartedly.
Which means Facebook will become increasingly cold and impersonal, like any other corporate entity.
And growth in advertising doesn't tell me anything. Most of the advertising market consists of a bubble in which all parties tell each other it's worth the money with very little evidence to show for it. But maybe that's just because I live in a bubble where advertising is mostly invisible.
Veritasium has an interesting related video explaining some of the Facebook shennanigans where they withhold your posts from a large amount of your subscribers if you're popular, unless you pay them money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
>“Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
That "Like many mediums" bit is a slap in the face. It's implying that those who would complain are unrealistic freeloaders or otherwise somehow at fault for their own declining engagement. This, even when it is really due to FB actively working to cause the decline.
Also, it completely pretends that FB has always been "like many mediums" and did not encourage like-activity, as well as re-inforce the benefits of said activity with previously higher levels of engagement.
The net message, essentially, is "why would you expect a free ride from FB, when you don't expect it anywhere else?"
Very snarky, condescending, and hostile.
People use Facebook to communicate with people that they know: liking a business or brand is a communication with friends, not with that business. You like something to put it on your profile, and put an entry on your newsfeed saying you like that thing. It's not to sign up to a newsletter.
Now Facebook has to make money so I am sure they will continue to change things to help advertisers reach people (for $$$). But there's no incentive to let companies engage in spammy practices - or at least, the grey area of unsolicited communication following an existing relationship - for free. In my view businesses who thought that somehow the rules had changed and that social networks meant free advertising forever, never had it right in the first place.
But isn't that exactly how Twitter works? And isn't that what Facebook users expect? To see all the posts of their friends and pages they Like?
But arguably now Facebook is so intrenched that it can remove some of this incentive and even profit of giving some of it back for a price.
If none of your non-paid posts are going to your social network of "likers", then you can't tell how useful having high likes on Facebook is. Then, what incentive is there for people to encourage people to "like" them of Facebook, to build the social network to eventually buy Facebook ads?
They are killing the goose that laid the golden egg by dialing down non-paid posts. Maybe large companies might continue to pay for ads, but new companies, or SMBs will completely lose incentive to build a Facebook following, since the ROI on building a Facebook following will be expensive and the result completely unpredictable.
Why can't it just be due to the growth of Facebook? There's more content competing for eyeballs, the way consumers engage with Facebook has probably changed over time, people may be following more pages than they used to, and so on.
Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
both videos show why facebook's model is inherently self-destructive and incoherent and will inevitably implode
I am subscribed to many pages and I don't "like" or comment on every post that a page makes. Over a time I have seen that Facebook shows me more from pages where I like or comment to posts most often and the rest start to vanish from my timeline but if I go back to a page and interact with with a few posts, suddenly I start seeing content from that page on my newsfeed.
So what Facebook is doing makes sense. Yes as a page owner I would like to reach maximum audience, but engagement is also key. This will ensure as a page owner I create more engaging and interesting content so more people engage with my page organically.
A musician friend on FB friend notes that posts containing the words "song" or "music" or that link to Soundcloud appear to get badly downvoted by the algorithm in casual tests he's done. Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
Facebook is a scam! Greedy, calculated scam.
All it's doing is driving down the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook, because the only things that can afford to throw bad money after bad money to reach users are massive corporations.
To me, though, that sounds like a dream marketing platform; one where you only have to pay for ads that do well, because you can push them for free to a small sample of your audience to test them.
Another possibility: if FB ever gets any good at figuring out from the content of a post who will like it, then a benevolent FB could show each post of yours to the 10% of your audience who actually wants to see it, but not spam them with the other 90%, which would make them stop following your page.
The free lunch is over. Next, paid developer apis...