A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24
blog.eat24hours.com
blog.eat24hours.com
What Facebook is doing is (over)engineering how my relationship with brands/people are, and I don't like that. If I like Robert Scoble on Facebook it is because I want to see what he has to say, and my like should not just be another stat on on Scoble's total number of followers. Hence, my use of Twitter is significantly higher than that on FB. Facebook is digging itself into a big hole.
I don't mean that to be antagonistic, I just don't have much understanding of that particular thing.
i. News, I want to stay up to date: I like to follow Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, Pando, Recode ii. General interest: The Economist, National Geographic, Science Magazine, various Universities iii. Companies I use their products/services or find interesting and what to get their updates: IBM, Dropbox, Disney, TED, Formula 1 teams, Raspberry Pi, a bunch of airlines, hotel chains, etc
Companies like Best Buy, Applebee's, Hilton each have over a million likes. Even much-maligned United Airlines has nearly 700,000.
Why do you want to engage with brands?
There are a ton of reasons to follow things that aren't friends. And Facebook was a great way to track all that stuff. Now, it isn't, because Facebook changed the algorithm. You can still find it if you manually click on the Pages Feed, which is handy for folks who know it's there. But most people don't, so most of what you take the time to post on Facebook as a business is barely seen by anyone.
If you really want regular updates from a vendor you sign up to their mailing list...
Or you follow them on social media because you use it more regularly than you use e-mail, or you find it more convenient.
Eat24's marketing team aren't stupid: they know this which is why you don't get coupon offers on Facebook, you get meme graphics, jokes about food and pictures of pizza. You get coupon offers by email without the jokes or on Twitter with them.
Edit: disagreement by downvoting is particularly lame when it comes without an explanation of why I'm supposedly wrong. You don't see everything that every person or brand has posted in your newsfeed, haven't done for a long time, and in practice wouldn't do without a lot of scrolling even if they didn't filter at all. Whether Facebook's intent in filtering Pages posts to your feed more aggressively than Friend posts to your feed is purely commercial, purely driven by user engagement metrics or something in between, it's hardly a new development or something that only applies to brands.
Yes it was. It was great for me for several years. I blocked games and kept my friends list to actual friends, and I was easily able to keep up with peoples' lives AND with products/companies I followed.
Eventually they changed the algorithm enough times, and hid/removed enough options, that I couldn't keep up. I posted a mini-rant in the comments here about it -- how FB's algorithm decided it was more important that I see a random not-very-close high school friend post an offensive political meme than that I see my brother's wedding pictures.
Keep it simple, and use your clever algorithms to present me with concrete choices, rather than simply enforcing them with no input.
As an avid Twitter consumer without a Facebook account, I agree with you...for now.
But until Twitter actually makes enough money to support itself, let's not get too far ahead with the "they're doing it right!" argument. I see no way that they don't eventually end up in the same boat as Facebook, forcing promoters to compete for limited space.
Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what they want to see?
IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses - if the only option was pay for reach nobody would be complaining. Because there has always been some amount of free reach there's an odd sense of entitlement.
It has always confused me that Facebook has done so little to monetize businesses, many of whom now list their Facebook pages in major advertising campaigns rather than their own website. Traditionally the service that Facebook provides to businesses was a pretty high value one, and it wasn't that the businesses brought users -- the businesses went to Facebook because the users were already there.
It's just apparently not something majority of their users need based on their usage patterns. If they switched to this as default, brands would complain as well, as a post appearing at 7 am is very unlikely to be scrolled down to by a user who checks Facebook at 8 pm their local time zone.
Edit: I post my stuff to Google+ too, especially groups that seem like there's some interest in the subject of my post. I'm happy enough with the results (from my analytics) that I'll keep doing it.
http://blog.eat24hours.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-websit...
To really put it into perspective, I just opened my Facebook now, first ad is in position 5 in my feed. The next ad popped in at the 52nd item in my feed. I went looking for a third ad.. I decided to stop after the 200th item in my feed and I generally don't scroll down that far in a single sitting.
Sure, there are ads on the side, but I'm more or less blind to those ads because they're always there.
That's not to say it was always like this. Candy Crush ads and whatnot used to pop up all the time from certain people. That's why you can hide those. They quickly disappear.
I guess it must just be cool to dump on Facebook now.
On both networks, every time you look at your feed you'll only look at the top X items. On Twitter, that'll just be the X most recent items. On Facebook, those X items are picked algorithmically based on the degree of engagement. The latter seems 1000x better and more intelligent than Twitter, even though it technically means not every post I'm subscribed to will make it into my feed.
As people spend more and more years on Facebook, we naturally accumulate more friends and pages (personally around 1200 friends and 200 pages). Thus, we're subscribed to more content. Far too much to reasonably make it into our feed. Given that X is fixed, the percentage of any particular source's posts which will make it into X should decline. It seems totally reasonable that which posts make it in are dictated by how much engagement those posts had.
Yes, you have 4000 fans. But I'm 99% sure you're not the only page they like. They probably like many other pages, and also have many other friends (2 numbers that increase over time). Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?
This is purely a problem of scale. Most of my friends don't see my updates, because they also have many other friends. But my mom sees every single update I have because I'm her only Facebook friend.
Perhaps it's annoying/confusing that Facebook gave you the option to monetarily combat the effects of a growing network. But organic growth also still works.
It's no coincidence that Facebook told me I could get more views by spending money to reach the same people I had been reaching organically just a few weeks before.
The solution is to stop trying to extort money from the businesses that helped them build their business and let the users decide what they want to see.
Given that you accept it's a statistical impossibility for all content I'm subscribed to to reach my feed, what we're debating is priorities. Before this algorithm change, I fully believe it was tilted too far in terms of brands—I received way too many updates from brands and few from my friends.
What you call extortion is what every sane person in the world calls advertising. If a magazine writes a story about my business (free advertising), that obviously doesn't entitle me to free advertising in all future issues. Neither does Facebook once giving you free reach.
Your analogy is wrong. Facebook did not write a free story about my business. I paid them to help me gather a group of people who were interested in my business. They never at any point said that I would have to pay to access those users. Then, after I spent a lot of money, time and effort maintaining that group, they told me that I couldn't access them without paying them again and again. That's extortion, not advertising.
As someone who has ran a business that has sold many millions of dollars of advertising you don't screw over your readers and advertisers to make an extra buck. It might work in the short term, but it's a failing business strategy.
If you "like" more posts from a page, you'll see more of their content. If you don't like their posts, you'll see less of it.
That's a naive explanation. Is there a day when everybody is supposed to be done with liking pages and vow never to like a page again? Was there a worldwide memo on this?
New quality pages appear all the time - IOC is creating a brand new page for each Olympics, large fashion brands create pages for distinct lines they launch, media promote their journalists' and topic pages in addition to main media pages.
And requiring people to pay to reach fans somehow magically fixes this? Does the payment requirement somehow supercede the best algorithms in perfectly balancing post activity? And, do brands with deeper pockets somehow automatically have the most compelling content?
Do you sincerely believe that this is all about solving that problem and it just happens to have a very positive impact on Facebook's bottom line?
>But organic growth also still works.
This statement is obviously and mathematically less true than it once was. Reaching one fan organically does not mean organic "works". Degree matters here and a much smaller percentage of posts organically reach fans than at a previous time. Somewhere between zero and 100, the degree of organic efficacy becomes a non-starter for companies who previously answered Facebook's call to engage with fans for free, and are now required to pay an untenable amount to reach them.
Yes. That's precisely the point. As a business, you can accept whatever the algorithm dictates or you can pay to override the algorithm (ie. advertising). No different than the tradeoff between hoping a magazine writes an article about you vs. guaranteed reach by purchasing an ad.
> This statement is obviously and mathematically less true than it once was.
I don't dispute this. It's the natural result of a growing network while people's attention stays finite.
You're moving the goalposts. The original problem was supposedly one of filtering noise from the consumer end. Now, you're talking about advertiser options for reaching their audiences. Yes, we know they now have a choice to pay or not. That's exactly the point.
To see the difference, consider if one advertiser with a massive budget could afford to pump out, say, 100 messages a day. Is the user now having a better experience?
So, agaim, how does forcing advertisers to pay suddenly balance the posts people see?
If you are happy to let your newsfeed be determined not by what you want but by who pays the most then good luck to you. It's bad for the fans and bad for us, and ultimately -- as you can see by the increasing number of anti-Facebook posts -- it's bad for Facebook.
(It will take longer because they charge substantially less, but it will happen because they charge substantially less.)
One flaw Facebook has, when everyone's been on it for years they collect hundreds of friends from random old parts of their life. This waters down the experience because random people you barely know posting all the time turns your feed into something less interesting.
Toss in more ads combined with old acquaintances, and distant family members and you have a spammy feed.
Plus advertisers are mad because they invested in broadening their reach only to have it taken away from them unless they pay to promote.
A new social network is a fresh social network, void of your parent's family friends and clothing companies you no longer care about.
Facebook is myspace all over again.
The most telling decline stat, my older sister who is a soccer mom and was obsessed with Facebook for years recently told me, "we don't really go on Facebook anymore, we use instagram." uh-oh, it's the non-technical family member indicator. She was the last one of us to get a smartphone too.
That's why Facebook is buying other internet properties. Because their's is on the decline with actual engaged users, their stats might show new users joining quickly, those are probably bots, spammers, and foreigners. Facebook's future is a universal login tool and a place to see you're great aunt's inspiration quote spam.
Switching hats, this also bothers me though. I'm a marketer for a lot of local businesses through my agency, and obviously this sucks. It's still a really valuable platform from a paid perspective. In fact using the some images and copy on facebook versus Reddit I get almost 5x the CTR and conversions. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're savvy and you're willing to treat Facebook like any other ad network there's still a lot of value to be had. The days of free engagement from pages seems to be coming to an end. That really sucks for people who paid to build their's up. Going back on features like that and screwing people etc. seems to be an endemic of the tech industry as a whole though and not just Facebook. Google Reader anyone?
I know this is more of a rant and points out more problems than solutions, but I just wanted to point out the situation is more complex than Facebook is bad let's hate them.
Can anyone post a link to a research-level paper explaining the algorithm? The name EdgeRank makes me think it's a ripoff of PageRank, so are they solving some sort of eigensystem for, what, an incidence matrix instead of an adjacency matrix?
Maybe the problem is that their algorithm is not really an algorithm. PageRank was good because it had an interpretation as a random walk that made sense (before SEO). EdgeRank can only be interpreted as an arbitrary formula.
Why not just go with the 100% free route and accept less engagement on their posts? They will still profit. People will still come to Facebook and search for them.
I'm no fan of Facebook either, but this just seems childish. In the end, it's not Facebook who's hurt. It's them and their FB-only fans.
Go look at their page and tell me: if you were in charge of Facebook's algorithm, would you put that stuff on every person's feed without charging a bunch of money???
I'm by no means an expert, but I know that their posts aren't exactly making me interested in ordering food or talking to them.
They do, however, have some posts that went viral, but they're really not suited towards their customer base.
It's just not a good feed. IMHO, and obviously also in Facebook's, they don't "deserve" any more attention when there are tons of more successful alternatives for Facebook to show.
Facebook is taxing their channel more in order to capture more of this value for themselves, but there's still value left over for companies to generate and capture for themselves.
Whether the company wants to build community, let customers know something (plumbing broken we are closed today) or simply show ads, facebook is a way to push it on customers. Website is not.
Most companies do not worry about "diluting" their web presence, they want to be shown as much as possible on as much as possible places.
But you are absolutely correct: we should own and develop our own web properties.
The sad truth is, it's hard to get eyeballs on your site. Once that changes the game will change.
Another "breakup letter"...fascinating...
The users do. Facebook will see declining participation if they keep taking user-hostile actions like this. People need to feel they are in charge of their feed (at least mostly in charge), but if they no longer control who sees their content, or which content they see, and hence become unhappy using the service or use it less, that's going to be a big problem for FB.
If spotify started to demand money for artists rather than pay them, artists would start to get angry.
Let's not pretend Eat24 was doing Facebook a favour here, or that anyone signed up to Facebook to look at pictures of pizza. Facebook was doing Eat24 a favour, and Eat24 were earning so nicely from it they were willing to experiment with shelling out money to continue distributing the same content.
That content becomes part of the reason people spend time on the platform, adding more opportunities for Facebook to sell actual ads (including to competitors, I might add). The network effect applies to companies, too!
Facebook is now denying that content to users who have said they want it, and destroying most of the value to the companies of creating that content. This is a reversal of their prior policies (thus a bait-and-switch), dishonest (if they don't want companies participating in their social network, they should just ban them and make them run ordinary ads), and just plain ol' stupid (because they're deliberately damaging their network and their image).
The new Facebook algorithm is kind of like signing up (liking) to a newsletter and then only receiving it every 10th edition.