Look I can understand the "oh it's so convenient that you can now pay to promote your posts" but the "turning down the volume" on the Newsfeed was done because our Newsfeeds were getting overrun. People added too many friends, thousands more than the 150 it's been proven we can reasonably empathize with, and people were doing more and more on the network.
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.
I resist the urge to say "don't be silly" here because not everyone is intimately familiar with the evolution of Facebook. I can understand believing that full access to every single one of your fan's, even the ones who have been ignoring your posts, is a right you have as a Facebook user.
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.
You have to realize, previously, when a page was "liked" that was equivalent to WANTING to see updates from this Facebook page. That simple like was a 2-way contract, you're interested in us, when we post, you will be aware of it. Now the "liker" could be missing out on items they find important, and the fan page is effectively impotent in reaching that fan unless they pay to promote the post.
It really is a bait and switch and I'm surprised there isn't MORE outrage about it.
I understand why people are frustrated, but you are failing to identify the root cause of their frustation: they were getting something of value (PR for businesses, sharing of personal information, etc.) from Facebook for free, and now they're complaining because Facebook wants to charge them for 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.
Without me (and people like me), they don't have a site. So, yeah, I'm their customer. I'm what makes their site a viable business. I'm about as from "just a user" as you can get.
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.
"Customer" and "user" are just words. To me, "customer" implies that you are paying, but I'm fine with adopting a different usage of the word for purposes of this discussion.
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.)
Bait and switch is absolutely still accurate, IMHO, but it doesn't matter what you call it, the effect is real.
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.
Perhaps I haven't made my position clear enough. I don't disagree that users are of value to Facebook, and that Facebook has an incentive to maximize that value. What I disagree with is the action that I see taken by users who are not satisfied with the exchange of value that is going on, particularly if those users are businesses.
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.
Thanks for the clarification. While you're right, technically, users don't own their Facebook pages or the content on them, there's a common sense perception that we do – and Facebook ignores that very real sentiment at their own peril.
Businesses, on the other hand, are a less gray area, IMHO, and I'd say I agree completely with what you've written here.
See, that's a pithy little saying that tries to be pointedly opinionated about Facebook's view of its users and I used to say the same thing... but it's not fully accurate. I chose my words carefully. Each of FB's users are supplying the data and page views that FB resells to advertisers.
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 object to Facebook making this decision for me. I _didn't_ add too many friends. My newsfeed _wasn't_ overrun. Yeah, I had to hide a few annoying Apps, but no big deal.
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.
>>I object to Facebook making this decision for me.
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.
> 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.
I don't think bostonpete was referring to this exact thread, but in the aggregate. That is, if enough people in enough places complain enough, it may change.
For a free service is sure does come at a cost. I get people I don't know commenting on photos of my 1 year old because a friend posted it to their wall.
Maybe, but doesn't help when it's actually their photo, just a photo which I have a vested interest in who see it. It's also not my job to educate my friends how to share content because I'd only end up upsetting them.
I agree. In a slightly different light, using Facebook is most definitely not free. You're entering a contract where they supply a valuable infrastructure, and you provide valuable, detailed, personal information. Information then sold to 3rd parties.
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...
"And, still, every couple of days Facebook forgets that I've set my sort to "Most Recent" and goes back to "Top Stories""
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.
After college, I gave all my Facebook "friends" the grocery store test. If I would avoid them if I saw them in a grocery store before they saw me, I deleted them as a friend. Keeps my "top" and "most recent" stories pretty equal, tbh.
And if any brand is overwhelming the newsfeed, it becomes pretty easy to make the decision to unlike their page
Just curious - why did you add people you'd actively avoid in real life as friends on Facebook? I don't think I have, or have ever had, anyone in that category in my FB list.
Facebook came to my college my sophomore year -- It was pretty common to meet someone in class/at a bar/library etc and be like "add me on Facebook!" So by the end of school I ended up with far too many people I didn't really want to actually keep in touch with.
>I object to Facebook making this decision for me.
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.
Convenient that this is also a windfall for Facebook - you know, it's for OUR benefit.
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.
Were they your friends or your customers? Or were your customers our actual inventory, what we sell to advertisers?
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.
This post misses the biggest logical point that is vitally needed: there was no Newsfeed in the beginning. At all.
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!
> That they now allow you to pay to promote is secondary to the original origin of why the Newsfeed works like it works.
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.
Company A changes Company A's product to support Company A is not a conflict of interest. I know people feel very strongly about Facebook and how it should act, but they are a company and a good one at that imo. People begrudging them for the individuals promoted posts is one thing that I can understand, but begrudging them charging brands for whom they've provided a platform FULL of amazing, free services?
Did you read my comment? I explicitly said I am not begrudging them the opportunity to make money however they want. If you want to quibble over the denotation of "conflict of interests" fine, let me put it this way:
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.
Can you actually get similar results to paying for promotion just by having really engaging, viral content?
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.
Bullshit. There are other ways they could have filtered Newsfeed- it didn't have to be an algorithm. People, fans, pages could do it themselves if only the platform enabled them.
It's a pain and hidden away-- just an after thought. They could make it a lot more obvious and a lot easier to use. They've got the resources to do better than what they've done with it.
Dangerous Minds is probably the best blog out there on the history of pop culture. (If there's one that is good or better, I'd like to know about it.) I started reading it regularly after running across it from three or four different angles. The main author can be shrill about controversies, but he's vastly knowledgeable about every nook and cranny of the last 50 years' worth of hipness.
They're doing the same thing with non-fan pages. If you want your content to go to your friends you now have to pay for the privilege. It's nuts. I haven't been on Facebook since I saw this, they can keep their social graph.
It is nuts. We're ALREADY paying customers by providing our data to Facebook. Now we have to pay to be heard? MySpace may actually take off when people begin to realize this.
Facebook has enough data to know how close you are to people, and there's even a "Close Friends" list you can add people to in order to see all of their posts. Your friends who want to see your posts will see them. Those who are ambivalent might not, and you can pay to make it show up for them.
Which is nuts. If they don't want to see it, don't show it to them regardless of if there was money involved. With their new system they have perverse incentives to not show your friends your content.
Facebook's data doesn't tell them how close you actually are to people, only how often you like/share/respond to their content -- and how many other people like their stuff.
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.
Has that actually happened to you? I doubt it, especially if you've indicated she's your mother on Facebook. People who post rarely would show up more often when they do post in any reasonable weighting scheme.
"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.
Yeah but it's a little bit trickier than that. If Facebook does things that alienate users, then those products will walk off the shelf - and not into someone's shopping cart.
Not yet, but one only has to look at the history of just about every widely popular digital offering to see that it is coming eventually. And, making decisions which alienate your users and make your service less enjoyable is a great way to speed that process along.
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.
This "product" meme is inaccurate and misleading. You are the product in the same way that Lebron James is the NBA's product, the same way that a top partner at Goldman Sacs is the product, the same way that Justin Bieber is the product, and the same way that you yourself is the product every time you apply for a job interview or raise funds.
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.
> This "product" meme is inaccurate and misleading. You are the product in the same way that Lebron James is the NBA's product, the same way that a top partner at Goldman Sacs is the product, the same way that Justin Bieber is the product, and the same way that you yourself is the product every time you apply for a job interview or raise funds.
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.
The NBA takes in ticket money and pays Lebron James a salary. Goldman Sachs takes in commissions and fees and pays their top partners a salary and bonuses. Justin Bieber's record company sells records and Justin Bieber gets a royalty check.
What is Facebook paying me for the content they are selling advertising against? Is the ability to access their service my compensation?
Facebook cares about keeping the shareholders happy. That means that they have to dramatically increase the opportunities for companies with money to give it to Facebook for access to the users.
It's very clear that Facebook doesn't care about keeping their users happy.
They went from 'provide opportunities for growth in size' to 'provide opportunities for growth of our bank account'. They'll continue to aggressively push this trend as far as they can - until users start leaving facebook for good.
Facebook has put themselves in an ideal situation. We're at the point in social media marketing that businesses can't survive without one, in fact they spend a lot of advertising money and placement in advertising their presence on Facebook, which is primarily an advertisement for Facebook. Every new connection, time on site, or new user to like your page is a huge win for them.
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?
You really think we're at that point? I'd be hard pressed to name a single thing I've bought that I discovered from a Facebook marketing effort. I'm currently drawing a blank, off the top of my head. I find local restaurants by walking/driving around or searching Google. I find out about products and the like from TV ads or just seeing them in stores.
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.
We all knew what the greatgrandparent was talking about when he said "wall". I see no reason to "correct" him just because facebook have decided to call it that anymore.
The whole premise of this article is "Facebook gave me this access to their platform for free hitherto, so I'm entitled to this access on those same terms in perpetuity; it's unfair for them to start charging for it." I don't see the author explaini why s/he is entitled to these same terms forever.
>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
Its a funny thing. When I read your comment I remember it saying exactly that on the Facebook Sign up page. Something along the lines of "Its free (and always will be)".
"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."
Personally, I thought it was awesome that Hem and Haw were linking to Who Moved My Cheese? and suggesting someone else needed to read it. This seems to be a very cut-and-dry Who Moved My Cheese scenario.
If you're posting 10-16 posts a day and you forcibly put each of these into 100% of your fans, you're going to shrink your base. If you did that to me, I'm going to hide or Unlike your page. If you emailed me those posts, I'd be hitting unsubscribe in half a day. The Facebook News Feed isn't an RSS reader, and the Like button isn't Subscribe.
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.
Do you have any large-scale statistical tests backing up your assertion that if you push 10 posts a day to peoples' Facebook feeds, your readership will shrink?
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.
Here's +1 to that statistic. If I see more then a few things a day I would definitly hide it. I already do. I love seeing interesting post pop up, but when your posts are takin over my feed you're gone :)
I would say it all depends on the reach. If a company publishes 10 posts a day, without promoting them, then I would think that only a few of the fans will get more than 2 or 3 of the posts that day (if we're to go with the 10%-20% estimate in the article).
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,
They may be looking for postings from their actual friends that happened while they were offline. Boredom is't the only reason for scrolling. And if you're pushing actual friends down the page by spamming my feed, well, I'm going to think a little less of you.
Through this type of self selection (those who don't want all the posts will unlike, those who do will continue to subscribe), the blog may end up with a user base of the most engaged fans rather than a larger user base that causes higher "sponsored post" fees.
The most important metric for businesses using social media is engagement rather than raw reach, IMO.
Unfortunately, I don't have concrete data. I should have been more careful to recommend that the author start testing with one post per day, and measure from there.
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.
So what? Annoying pages can get un-liked, and the problem will work itself out. But if someone is a "Fan" of the brand and wants to see all of their 15 posts in a day, it's frustrating they can't. The default in Facebook is always "Most Popular", and even when I change it to "Most Recent" (to see the long tail of my friends activities, since I don't trust Facebook), Facebook always sets it back.
That's exactly what I was thinking. If you like a fan page you should expect to get stuff from it.
I don't get mails from facebook saying someone posts stuff, I only get notifications up on the little globe icon so I don't care when Princess Bride or Pulp Fiction sends out little pictures of whatever. It's not annoying at all. (Unlike farmville requests, which I swear I block these apps weekly but they always notify me anyway)
If you have a page you're interested in following just add it to your interest lists on Facebook. This way you can turn Facebook into your own personal reader. The main Facebook feed has its downfalls and limitations but if you take a couple minutes to create your own personalized friend lists and interest lists you bypass this problem completely.
That bugs me too. I like a lot of things, but I don't want to hear or see any of them in my timeline.
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.
This is a tricky thing. Facebook's business model, and its value proposition to advertisers to a large degree depends on oversharing, and your "Likes" are an example of this. If somebody asked me if I wanted my email subscriptions broadcast to all my friends, I would say "heck no." But if nobody agreed to share their subscriptions, then how would advertisers get word of mouth?
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.
This sums up very nicely the conundrum that facebook finds itself in. I read somewhere, probably on HN, an analogy that Google is like a phonebook - a place one actively is trying to seek out information and lookup things that may be purchased, so ads follow logically from this scenario. Facebook is like a yearbook or chatroom, where people are engaging with their friends, not in a search for product information or trying to shop. I'm sure this can be tweaked and messed with over time, but inevitably any attempt to try to inject shopping or advertising into communication with friends is going to be met with resistance. And that resistance level is met earlier on a mobile platform.
Why are you thinking from just on page's perspective? Most of the time a page is liked when a friend of the user shares a post from the page that the user finds interesting, it may be a kitten image, funny joke, a post about your favorite movie/actor, or about a good food on a restaurant etc. Number of pages he likes depends on how much he uses Facebook. If he is moderately active the number of pages he likes would certainly reach 3 digit number. Now imagine 15 posts per day from each of the pages! It is definitely annoying. Now you are saying about "Most Popular" setting, on which criteria will you define a post belongs to popular category? Recommendation engine is a hard problem. Page owners may complain that their pages are not getting any traction. So I think it is a fair option to pay a small price to Facebook to make sure that the post of the page will surely reach to its followers.
The author is expecting that all 54k fans should see the page's posts, and that fewer impressions are feeling like extortion. That expectation is both incorrect and unreasonable. There will always be users who don't log in each day. Even if FB queued up the News Feed to show the post, the impression will never be driven because they haven't scrolled far enough down.
I do agree about the sort preference -- I wish it was sticky.
If you did it to me I'd have the same reaction, but I'm not most people-- I log onto Facebook something like once a month, and use the magic of RSS feeds instead of fan pages.
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.
Shouldn't it just be a deteriorating reach % after your first/second post of the day?
That would be a better middle-ground than making $ by suddenly handicapping user's FB page reach.
That's the first thing I thought when I read the post. I was against Facebook's position at the beginning, but now I'm really glad they are charging that fee.
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.
That's a good perspective. I'm enjoying this thread because both sides make solid points I can agree with. Which highlights to me the challenge inherent to the position Facebook finds itself in.
Let's not forget the intent of this article- Facebook is screwing page owners and real fans of the page over. Like used to be "Become a Fan". And a page owner used to be able "Send updates" to fans. There are lots of us who had tens of thousands of fans, who actually were fans. But "Fan" became "Like" and "Send updates" disappeared, and slowly posts that were shown to most of your fans were now showed to almost none. Through all these changes and monetization products Facebook has diluted it all to the point it's become useless.
They're hacks and cheats. There are other ways they could have done this.
Agreed, when I get any more than 2 or 3 daily posts I tend to end up either unliking the page or unticking "show in news feed" - unless the posts are from a page whose content I always enjoy, like "I Fucking Love Science"
How is anyone even surprised about this? If you're making money off of someone else's platform, it's only a matter of time before they're gonna ask for a cut.
This post is pretty overboard with its exaggeration. But one thing I find interesting is the concept that Facebook is a paid publishing platform. They'll deliver your posts to 15% of your followers as a freebie, but to reach 100%, you pay. And I hadn't thought of it that way before.
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.
I think the problem here is assuming what the purpose of the 'like' button is. It's not a 'follow' or 'sign up for mailing list' or even 'add friend' button. I think the meaning of this button will have to be defined by users, the company and page owners over time, if one stake-holder has too great a voice then the button will fail, for this action to be useful all parties involved will need to gain from it and that means some compromise will be needed as well until the correct balance is reached.
If I'm reading this correctly, the problem is that something that the author thinks should be free costs money, so Facebook is now "demanding that a $365 million dollar ransom gets collected from all the Mom & Pop businesses who use Facebook."
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.)
Especially considering his intent for them to see his posts on facebook are to drive "viewers" to his site so that he can extract advertising revenue.
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.
You can find better selection, better prices, and better advice on the Internet. Also, Jeff bezos doesn't give me the "I hate young people" stink eye when I browse his store.
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.
Home Depot (Starbucks, Applebee's, whatever) set both a floor and a ceiling for expectation of quality. For every crappy mom and pop hardware store that is poorly run, there is also an independent hardware store with kind and helpful people.
When I am traveling, I will go to Starbucks, but in my city, I know where the exceptional coffee is.
Interesting point about this: I recently needed a tool while visiting a friend. I found the nearest hardware store's website and was irate that they didn't have hours listed. So I called. And while they technically closed 90 minutes previously, somebody was in setting up a new POS system they were switching to. He opened the shop and I got what I needed. That also doesn't happen at Home Depot.
The problem is that most celebrations of small businesses suffer from a fallacy along the lines of (exceptional service can only happen at small businesses[1]) => (all small businesses will have exceptional service).
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.
You talk about rational thought, but then go off on a tangent hoping all small business disappears? I'm curious what has made you so hateful towards both people who hold some ideal (that you don't share), and towards small businesses.
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.
Sure, and the market won't likely be kind to them.
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.
>By their continued existence and success we can see first hand that they deserve to be in business.
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.
"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."
I have the opposite problem. Bands etc that I "page-like" and who post too much take over my newsfeed and I only have the option to hide everything or view everything (if FB wants).
IIRC there was previously a "see only important messages from this person" choice and it was better.
I could tell the general path the HN discussion was going to take - free service, free country, etc. - but the bigger issue is all the companies that have been paying Facebook millions for page like campaigns.
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.
This is a really good point. If I had spent money on advertising in the past to get more likes I would feel pretty cheated. I wonder what impact these changes are having on sales for that type of advertising?
I don't think that posts ever reached 100% of your friends or fans. I can't find the article but I remember something like 40% was the amount of friends who see any given post. I don't really mind it but it would be nice to have a little better understanding of the logic behind it.
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.
>'I despise it.' Hear that beleaugered holders of Facebook stock? That kind of talk would make my blood run cold. How many companies can you name that you actively despise?
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.
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".
>1) dominate their respective markets (as monopolies or one of a small number of oligopolistic suppliers),
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.
194 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadYou 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.
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.
Unless you pay the vig. Spam away as long as Zuck gets a taste.
You can't have it both ways.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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..
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.
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...
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
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.
--
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
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.
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.
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.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_graph
Hasn't happened yet, from what I can see.
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.
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.
Maybe the "product meme" is misleading, but i think that the "customer" label is also misleading.
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.
What is Facebook paying me for the content they are selling advertising against? Is the ability to access their service my compensation?
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 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.
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14404
His conclusion? Not Facebook
>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.
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 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,
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.
The most important metric for businesses using social media is engagement rather than raw reach, IMO.
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.
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 do agree about the sort preference -- I wish it was sticky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
IIRC there was previously a "see only important messages from this person" choice and it was better.
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.
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.
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".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o
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.
$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.