You’re right. Facebook is and always were deeply unethical in all their ways.
I spent a lot of time there because it was a good way to stay in touch with remote friends, but even that started to feel phoney and the “Facebook never forgets” thing ever more creepy. I wish I knew how to make people stop putting all Internet infrastructure onto that page.
That’s my main problem with all of this. When Facebook says that companies will need to pay to get posts from their pages seen by people who’ve liked their page, it completely ignores the large number of pages that are either small companies (as in one person craft operations), DIY bands, social events, etc.
These aren’t the entities which would normally pay for advertising in the real world, they’re the ones which pass via word of mouth, and friends telling friends about them. They’re the ones which would have been discussed on forums, message boards or similar (at least in terms of bands/gigs in my area), but Facebook was useful enough to slowly cause that to decay.
It’s not just posts from pages which are being reduced either unless you pay. I tried this out in October by posting the same status with and without promoting it, just asking people to like it if they saw it. I got about 40% more of my friends seeing the promoted one than the standard one. If you assume that you’re talking to all your friends when you post something on Facebook, you’re very, very wrong.
I have been having a lot of success using this new social networking site.
While it’s true that you have complete control over your audience on your own website. The problem is that potential readers/customers aren’t always on my website, they’re on Facebook. All. Day. Long. That’s the best way to reach them other than email (which I’ve now focused my marketing efforts on that - the reader controls whether or not they want to hear from us, not some Facebook/Google algorithm). I don’t have a problem with having an ad system in place to page to reach more people. I have a problem with encouraging people to build a following and then turning the page and saying that you now need to pay to reach all the people who have CONSENTED to see your updates. It’s bait and switch and it’s just not fair. So, here’s me caring less and less about Facebook for marketing. Facebook will simply become a platform for giant corporations to be another marketing stream. Small businesses like us will have no place in it.
To play Devil’s Advocate: what would it mean for FB to show every post from companies?
Does Facebook show every post from your friends? If you have over 50 friends, you’re probably glad that it doesn’t. We may not always even notice the quantity of posts that FB is hiding - when we don’t, FB is doing its job right. I know I would be swamped if I saw every post some friends made.
So is everyone arguing that companies should be privileged over friends? I think we’d all be even angrier if that were the case.
Are folks arguing that we should always see everyone’s posts? FB would be impossible to use. Cut down to just 20 friends, you say? Then why not use email?
I often “like” companies that I feel friendly towards, or loyal to - and want to show that loyalty by increasing their likes. Does that mean I must be subjected to dozens of posts a day by these companies? No, I’m happy that FB filters their posts to show me those few that are generating some attention.
Or are people just annoyed because FB is trying to make money?
Blow up facebook?
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Well again, whether I friend a real person or “like” a business, it’s with the expectation that I want to see what they have to say, even if it’s marketing. Maybe I’m in the minority. If someone becomes too noisy, I just unlike/unfriend. Pretty simple.
I don’t “like” a company merely to up their like count, in the grand scheme of things what does that really mean to them anyway?
Despite the paid sidebar ads, the one thing that Facebook has done is enable the aggregation of advertising that I’m /actually/ interested in. Since most of the businesses I do business with realize this, they actually do try to insert actual useful information into their feeds (links to instructional videos, posts about local bands, etc). A business that uses their feed for constant begging for business tend to not stay in my circle for very long…
As for the question about whether I’m annoyed that FB is trying to make money, the answer is no. I’m pretty sure that their paid sidebar advertising combined with the selling of user data is more than enough to pay the bills. I’m irked because forcing a business to pay to enable me to see content that I’ve welcomed with open arms seems to be contradicting/breaking what Facebook is supposed to be.
Right, but imagine that Facebook is the TV station and you are the producer of the TV show and I am the viewer. I’ve chosen to watch your show, Facebook has agreed to air your show in exchange for the value of my eyeballs. Facebook sells ad time during your show to keep their lights on…
I don’t see NBC demanding that the producers of Hannibal pony up cash for the privilege of being aired on NBC…
(and before someone points out that Hannibal isn’t a business: mugs, t-shirts, DVDs, etc)
Ah… It’s a profit deal.
Damn evil companies making money and shit.
This has to be the dumbest false analogy I ever seen anyone attempt to make.
In what what is this the dumbest false analogy? It’s a response to someone trying to equate paying Facebook to paying a TV station, and my point is that they have the roles all mixed up…
“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’s why Psychic Source runs stuff like this:
Or perhaps she meant “as in many media” in that emailed statement.
I intentionally do not “like” companies or organizations on Facebook because I don’t want to see their updates/advertisements. I use Facebook to stay in touch with my family and friends.
There are a few semi-obscure things that I’ve purposefully subscribed to on Facebook so that I see their updates. Because I’ve subscribed to them (and didn’t just “like” them), I get their occasional updates just like they were a friend.
We did a detailed cost of user acquisition study for a business, and Facebook was almost 3x the cost per user of Google AdWords. I’m sure a different business will get a different result, but my general impression was that FaceBook is not very cost effective advertising.
Based on that, I was surprised that so many other advertisers think it’s cost effective. I haven’t analyzed their earnings reports, but my impression is that the whole thing is a house of cards. If they have to resort to making advertisers pay to increase the ranking of adds disguised as social posts, the integrity of the feed is compromised, and that will only hasten the exodus that is already happening.
I think Facebook created the Newsfeed and is charging money for attention because they recognize that this is their best long term strategy for recurring revenue. There’s a ton of companies listed at BuyFacebookLikesReviews that do nothing other than help companies get more likes. Ok, that’s all well and good, but after a small business goes out and builds up their audience, where does that leave Facebook? They recognize that they can charge money forever from all businesses out there to increase their reach and actually get their word out. As a user, this isn’t a good situation. As a business, this isn’t ideal. The only entity this system is good for is Facebook. But that doesn’t change as long as Facebook is the only social network that has a real mass reach.
I’ve read a lot of the replies and have been reading quite a bit on this topic. As a small business owner and marketer that has worked with a number of companies in varying industries and size, this simply is a new challenge for us marketers out there. As marketers we need to be nothing if not adaptable. Every time we become comfortable with a platform or technology the rules change (they always will). This is just a new set of rules and if your business or client relies solely on their Facebook fans I’d challenge and say their marketing plan should be more diverse. Facebook has made their decision (better or worse) and now its time to make yours. There will still be value on Facebook and the data should direct you to show how much value there is. Who’s happy about potentially increased budgets or shifting of budgets? Certainly not me. It should force us all to go back and look at efforts to date and scrutinize our facebook efforts to date and how “worth it” they are and will continue to be.
It does annoy me that they don’t show me every single post by all of my friends. If I accept a friend request or hit like on a page, it means that I’m saying I want to see posts by that person/thing. If I didn’t want to see their content, I wouldn’t have connected with them. If i want to see less of their stuff, it should be up to me to opt out or opt to see less. It shouldn’t be facebook’s algorithm trying to make that decision for me. I can see offering a “top posts” option that will allow the algorithm to sort and try to predict the best stuff for the folks who are in a hurry. But the default option should be an unfiltered and unabridged version that gives me exactly what I explicitly said I wanted, the posts from people I said were my friends and things I liked.
It occurs to me that FB is a pretty good Petri dish for what an Internet without Net Neutrality would look like. The ISPs will simply tell businesses, “If you don’t pay these rates your packets won’t reach 94% of the people on our networks.”
FB is under no obligation to be fair or to behave impartially with respect to the businesses that use its various services. It’s all a matter of individual contracts, which is exactly what will happen if net neutrality goes away. The carriers assure us that they would never do anything like this, but they (like FB) are public companies with a mandate to maximize profits.
I don’t think it helps to dispute the evils of FB, but I do think it’s worth realizing they are behaving according to standard corporation rationality. How each of us as individuals or businesses respond to that is a separate matter.
That may be what you think, but unless you have very few friends you don’t actually know. You already don’t see a lot of what they post, and if you did see everything they posted you probably would have unfriended a bunch an/or complained about how you see way too many things.[quote=“Jared_Kaufman, post:32, topic:26572”]
It’s a response to someone trying to equate paying Facebook to paying a TV station, and my point is that they have the roles all mixed up…
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People turn on their TVs to watch Hannibal. I don’t know that many people go to facebook to catch up with their favourite companies.
