Ambiguous headline: 'over' meaning 'finished'? Or 'over' meaning 'located'?
Veritasium has an interesting related video explaining some of the Facebook shennanigans where they withhold your posts from a large amount of your subscribers if you're popular, unless you pay them money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
My point probably wasn't very clear - in a summary of article headlines, this one would be a little ambiguous. It may be intentional, but it doesn't feel like it.
This sounds reasonable and similar to the LinkedIn monetization strategy. The core competency of Facebook is communication, not ads, so making money on communication is ideal.
All it's doing is driving down the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook, because the only things that can afford to throw bad money after bad money to reach users are massive corporations.
This almost seems like desperation. Time is ticking, earnings need to be delivered, one quick heist after another, with user base dropping, people adverse to being a marketing dataset.
People are quick to paint this as Facebook twisting the screw, but do we know definitively, not speculatively, that this is an intentional and planned effect, like there's some variable somewhere that determines what percentage of a page's fans will see a post before it stops being shown?
Why can't it just be due to the growth of Facebook? There's more content competing for eyeballs, the way consumers engage with Facebook has probably changed over time, people may be following more pages than they used to, and so on.
A musician friend on FB friend notes that posts containing the words "song" or "music" or that link to Soundcloud appear to get badly downvoted by the algorithm in casual tests he's done. So anecdote, but not completely untested anecdote.
This was ultimately a massive bait and switch and I can't believe more people don't find it disgusting. Facebook gave off the impression you would be able to reach people who became your fan on their network.. until they didn't need any more free marketing. Now that everyone is on Facebook, they've decided to focus on the user experience more and leave all the brands who promoted them out in the cold.
It would be one thing if they were charging all along, or made that intention clear. Instead they took all the free marketing and slowly scaled down how many of your fans saw your posts (frog in boiling water?). It's to the point now where I have pages that reach .1% of my fans. Facebook now wants thousands of dollars for just ONE post to reach a significant portion (not even all) of my fan base.
Ultimately, I don't think Facebook had a choice. The user experience, with the amount of pages some people like, would be horrendous. But to spend any time or money to try to build a fan page on Facebook now would be a joke. Anyone currently spending their advertising dollars to buy likes on Facebook is terribly misinformed on the impact it will have (none).
Additionally, it seems many of the major brands I've seen advertising via print, TV, etc. have been only promoting their Twitter accounts now. I have to assume this is a reaction to Facebook burning them and now they are trying to make Twitter a larger threat to Facebook.
> Ultimately, I don't think Facebook had a choice. The user experience, with the amount of pages some people like, would be horrendous.
If someone doesn't like the content from a Page they follow, they should unfollow it: I specifically follow the things I do because I want to see their content... it does not improve the user experience to limit that content; if anything, it destroys the user experience, as the reason I go to Facebook is to see the content from the people and brands I like: showing me less of the stuff I like leaves me disappointed and unsatisfied.
The real issue here is creating an algorithm that optimizes what you like best: friend content, page content, and/or games/apps/etc. I would guess the majority of the population has higher engagement with friend content then page content, which is why their algorithms show pages less and less. Not necessarily a malicious "bait and switch" (because that implies forethought, which I am highly skeptical was the case if you worked in a tech company in the valley for more than 3 months) but rather not providing the best solution for an algorithmic news feed.
FWIW, I also would not claim that this is malicious: however, I still do not feel like these algorithms build a better news feed experience. I often go to Facebook, scroll through all the content for the day, and don't find enough of what I actually care about: it filters what it thinks are the top things from the day, and shows this content in something vaguely approximating chronological order. If a site is going to do this fancy filtering, I want a "no, show me more" button: I follow enough things that the idea that I would reach the end of the content posted recently is silly.
That said, I think a key issue here is that I feel these algorithms are "solving the wrong problems"... if a friend is using some game and keeps posting from from it, everyone needs to realize that isn't the game's fault: that friend is choosing to post that stuff as they actually care about that game. They hope--they might even expect--that people are seeing that content: if your friend is spam, maybe you should unfollow your friend (Facebook thankfully now lets you do this without unfriending them, which might have political consequences ;P).
This is important, as if a different person were playing that same game, the importance of the content might be fundamentally different: there are people in my life whom I would love to see those silly game posts from, to the point where it would make my day to see the games being played: if nothing else, I would know they are still alive and active (if maybe wasting their time and energy ;P).
This is true if everything, not just games, and frankly seems to come down to pretty simple use cases: use cases that I would be shocked if it turned out most people didn't share. I have one friend that loves taking photographs, and they all kind of suck; I have another whose photographs are downright awe inspiring: I want to follow the photos from the second one, and not the first. I don't want more of the second and fewer of the first, I don't want the Photos app itself to be judged somehow "this guy seems to like photos more than games", I just want to see the second guy's photos and not the first (and maybe the first guy's gaming, and not the second's ;P).
I say this is a common use case, as I swear everyone I know complains about similar issues: I have a friend who, despite having marked his wife as "Close Friend", misses content she posts (something I didn't believe, until I had it happen to me as well: some kinds of content isn't considered relevant enough for a notification even if you insist that all that user's content is relevent). I have another who only uses Facebook to post links and photos, and most people I talk to love her links but don't care about her photos (especially in one particular album: it would be great to be able to mark someone "Close Friend" and then unfollow one album ;P).
I thereby end up returning to what I had said in my previous comment: I followed the pages I do because I liked their content... because I wanted to see more of their content... because that content made me happy. If that content doesn't make me happy, I want to think I'm responsible enough to unfollow the page, and I want to believe I live in a world where others are also capable of this.
I also do not think any algorithm is going to figure this out automatically: I follow the page of a movie that posts quotes and screengrabs from the film. Like the comics in a newspaper, these snippets are a familiar and beneficial part of my perusal of Facebook: they are part of what I enjoy about visiting the website. I never comment on the screengrabs, nor do I "like" them (I would rather others not know what sappy parts of the sappy movie I'm most connecting with today ;P)... I'm not even clicking them... I have no clue how Facebook would ever figure out I want to see those, all of those, if it is going to insist on ignoring my explicit "I want to follow this Page...
Make sure to click Like on things you really want to see. I made a point of skimming through liking all the good stuff, and now my feed is much better.
> If someone doesn't like the content from a Page they follow, they should unfollow it
I've been doing some of this lately, but initially I did not follow most of my current likes because I wanted to see their content. Most of them are not things I ever explicitly "liked"! Facebook used to have areas of your profile where you listed your favorite movies, favorite bands, etc. At some point these got converted into follows of pages, without me opting in. When I said that I liked the band Coil, whose principals are now dead, I did not thereby imply that I intended to follow some profiteering asshole who controls their Facebook "Page". And yet that's what happened. I do unfollow these when they show up in my feed with objectionable content. But I think it's a mistake to assume that people want to see the content from the Pages they "follow" (admittedly, a mistake of Facebook's own making).
This is entirely fair; in fact, the same thing happened to me. However, this problem doesn't seem solved by filtering the content: it seems like it should be solved by not tricking people into automatically following pages just because they liked the brand as an entity as opposed to the content on Facebook coming from that brand. Facebook has a weird and unfortunate mix of "like" and "follow" behaviors, especially with regards to the "favorite X" part of the profile. One thing I will say, though: they at least did separate like vs. follow at some point, which at least makes this issue solvable by the user.
I'm not sure when it was introduced but pages now have an option to continue to 'like' them but unfollow their content. So you can still have your likes appear on your profile but you will never see their posts.
I agree. They've really diminished the value of a like. Rather than encouraging unliking they're making the content providers pay to make their likes more valuable than the likes of their competitors. It makes business sense for Facebook, but it really destroys the value to the user. I'm tempted to delete my Facebook page, but I still do get a little engagement. We'll see how long that lasts.
It always seemed fairly clear to me that the whole "like us on Facebook" thing was Facebook treating businesses as sharecroppers, harnessing their marketing effort, with no promise of allowing them to keep the eventual rewards. Unfortunately, it seems like many businesses bought into it because there weren't any very good alternative for a non-technical organization to keep in touch with their customers (except maybe Twitter).
I hear this refrain over and over again -- my posts aren't being shown to my fans! -- but it does not match up with my experience at all. My posts usually reach 35-45% of my fans. Organically, without any promotion. Granted I only have a total of ~2000 fans... perhaps this effect everyone is talking about only kicks in e.g. above 10k fans?
To be honest, I think everyone is just crying that "Facebook isn't showing my fans the stupid and unengaging crap that I post". How about trying some actual content that your fans might actually want to see? The one thing FB has become very adept at is filtering out crap.
I'm a part of a hobbyist organization that has over 40k likes on Facebook - we pretty much only post relevant content to our fans, and for the most part it is organic (and still growing). We've been pretty happy with how well the outreach has been & our user engagement, and that's without being aggressive.
If you post crap, users won't want to see your crap - would you want to see crap?
This has been my experience too. I stick to my personal profile though. People who endure liberal propaganda, bad jokes, and half-developed ideas are a very small and focused niche.
> But if the brands, organizations and celebrities that use Pages want to continue to reach Facebook’s 1.23 billion monthly users in the future, they’re going to have to pay up.
The free lunch is over. Next, paid developer apis...
This is what I am seeing with my FB page. Over a year ago with with fewer likes I was able to reach more people. With almost 18,000 likes, I can barely reach a thousand people now. The funny part is if a post is doing well, FB will suggest you to advertise the post since its getting "higher than usual engagement".
You seem to hate the decisions they've made, and are quoting that to show how bad it is.
To me, though, that sounds like a dream marketing platform; one where you only have to pay for ads that do well, because you can push them for free to a small sample of your audience to test them.
Another possibility: if FB ever gets any good at figuring out from the content of a post who will like it, then a benevolent FB could show each post of yours to the 10% of your audience who actually wants to see it, but not spam them with the other 90%, which would make them stop following your page.
If none of your non-paid posts are going to your social network of "likers", then you can't tell how useful having high likes on Facebook is. Then, what incentive is there for people to encourage people to "like" them of Facebook, to build the social network to eventually buy Facebook ads?
They are killing the goose that laid the golden egg by dialing down non-paid posts. Maybe large companies might continue to pay for ads, but new companies, or SMBs will completely lose incentive to build a Facebook following, since the ROI on building a Facebook following will be expensive and the result completely unpredictable.
FB has pimping down so cold I gotta tip my hat to Zuck! Gotta love how they "gameify" customer communication. The message to every business was... everything has changed... now all that matters is FB likes. Don't ask why just chase that... Ok cool, got a bunch of likes now? Ok now we're gonna restrict your posts and make you pay every time you want to reach them. God forbid you just ask for customers phone number or Email? Instead we run your list for you... and we repeatedly resell portions of your customer access back to you via some mysterious and ever changing algorithm. Now that my friends is pimpin!
Maybe I've been talking to the wrong people, but all I hear about marketing through Facebook pages is that it delivers little to no results, and most companies that have a Facebook page aren't actively maintaining it anymore.
And growth in advertising doesn't tell me anything. Most of the advertising market consists of a bubble in which all parties tell each other it's worth the money with very little evidence to show for it. But maybe that's just because I live in a bubble where advertising is mostly invisible.
How about Facebook add a "Follow" feature to get 100% of the posts? They don't even need to show the number of followers a page has received. At least then users have the option to see everything a page has to offer. "Likes" no longer have any meaning, so we need something that actually means something.
Overall, FB is taking a very hostile position and it is only thinly veiled.
>“Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
That "Like many mediums" bit is a slap in the face. It's implying that those who would complain are unrealistic freeloaders or otherwise somehow at fault for their own declining engagement. This, even when it is really due to FB actively working to cause the decline.
Also, it completely pretends that FB has always been "like many mediums" and did not encourage like-activity, as well as re-inforce the benefits of said activity with previously higher levels of engagement.
The net message, essentially, is "why would you expect a free ride from FB, when you don't expect it anywhere else?"
So what? Who are the users who want to be spammed forever following 'Like'-ing a business or brand?
People use Facebook to communicate with people that they know: liking a business or brand is a communication with friends, not with that business. You like something to put it on your profile, and put an entry on your newsfeed saying you like that thing. It's not to sign up to a newsletter.
Now Facebook has to make money so I am sure they will continue to change things to help advertisers reach people (for $$$). But there's no incentive to let companies engage in spammy practices - or at least, the grey area of unsolicited communication following an existing relationship - for free. In my view businesses who thought that somehow the rules had changed and that social networks meant free advertising forever, never had it right in the first place.
It is convenient for Facebook that it is in the best interests of the users. Facebook in part become as big as it is today via the free advertising it receives on the vast majority of business advertising which includes a Facebook page link or even just an icon. Businesses have been incentivized to build this audience.
But arguably now Facebook is so intrenched that it can remove some of this incentive and even profit of giving some of it back for a price.
I have paid around 1000 USD for my fans using Facebook Ads, and now I can't reach them, I can't browse them (no search box in the fan list), I can't write to them...
And you thought that people who had specifically asked to read you should be able to read you! Foolish human.
A musician friend on FB friend notes that posts containing the words "song" or "music" or that link to Soundcloud appear to get badly downvoted by the algorithm in casual tests he's done. Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
I have a page with 1K+ likes and I too have seen that posts don't reach as many people as it used to be. But what I have noticed is that there are some regulars who always like almost every post on the page. So may be the more you like the content of a page, the more of that page you see is what Facebook is dong and it kind of makes sense.
I am subscribed to many pages and I don't "like" or comment on every post that a page makes. Over a time I have seen that Facebook shows me more from pages where I like or comment to posts most often and the rest start to vanish from my timeline but if I go back to a page and interact with with a few posts, suddenly I start seeing content from that page on my newsfeed.
So what Facebook is doing makes sense. Yes as a page owner I would like to reach maximum audience, but engagement is also key. This will ensure as a page owner I create more engaging and interesting content so more people engage with my page organically.
47 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadVeritasium has an interesting related video explaining some of the Facebook shennanigans where they withhold your posts from a large amount of your subscribers if you're popular, unless you pay them money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
All it's doing is driving down the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook, because the only things that can afford to throw bad money after bad money to reach users are massive corporations.
Why can't it just be due to the growth of Facebook? There's more content competing for eyeballs, the way consumers engage with Facebook has probably changed over time, people may be following more pages than they used to, and so on.
Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
It would be one thing if they were charging all along, or made that intention clear. Instead they took all the free marketing and slowly scaled down how many of your fans saw your posts (frog in boiling water?). It's to the point now where I have pages that reach .1% of my fans. Facebook now wants thousands of dollars for just ONE post to reach a significant portion (not even all) of my fan base.
Ultimately, I don't think Facebook had a choice. The user experience, with the amount of pages some people like, would be horrendous. But to spend any time or money to try to build a fan page on Facebook now would be a joke. Anyone currently spending their advertising dollars to buy likes on Facebook is terribly misinformed on the impact it will have (none).
Additionally, it seems many of the major brands I've seen advertising via print, TV, etc. have been only promoting their Twitter accounts now. I have to assume this is a reaction to Facebook burning them and now they are trying to make Twitter a larger threat to Facebook.
If someone doesn't like the content from a Page they follow, they should unfollow it: I specifically follow the things I do because I want to see their content... it does not improve the user experience to limit that content; if anything, it destroys the user experience, as the reason I go to Facebook is to see the content from the people and brands I like: showing me less of the stuff I like leaves me disappointed and unsatisfied.
That said, I think a key issue here is that I feel these algorithms are "solving the wrong problems"... if a friend is using some game and keeps posting from from it, everyone needs to realize that isn't the game's fault: that friend is choosing to post that stuff as they actually care about that game. They hope--they might even expect--that people are seeing that content: if your friend is spam, maybe you should unfollow your friend (Facebook thankfully now lets you do this without unfriending them, which might have political consequences ;P).
This is important, as if a different person were playing that same game, the importance of the content might be fundamentally different: there are people in my life whom I would love to see those silly game posts from, to the point where it would make my day to see the games being played: if nothing else, I would know they are still alive and active (if maybe wasting their time and energy ;P).
This is true if everything, not just games, and frankly seems to come down to pretty simple use cases: use cases that I would be shocked if it turned out most people didn't share. I have one friend that loves taking photographs, and they all kind of suck; I have another whose photographs are downright awe inspiring: I want to follow the photos from the second one, and not the first. I don't want more of the second and fewer of the first, I don't want the Photos app itself to be judged somehow "this guy seems to like photos more than games", I just want to see the second guy's photos and not the first (and maybe the first guy's gaming, and not the second's ;P).
I say this is a common use case, as I swear everyone I know complains about similar issues: I have a friend who, despite having marked his wife as "Close Friend", misses content she posts (something I didn't believe, until I had it happen to me as well: some kinds of content isn't considered relevant enough for a notification even if you insist that all that user's content is relevent). I have another who only uses Facebook to post links and photos, and most people I talk to love her links but don't care about her photos (especially in one particular album: it would be great to be able to mark someone "Close Friend" and then unfollow one album ;P).
I thereby end up returning to what I had said in my previous comment: I followed the pages I do because I liked their content... because I wanted to see more of their content... because that content made me happy. If that content doesn't make me happy, I want to think I'm responsible enough to unfollow the page, and I want to believe I live in a world where others are also capable of this.
I also do not think any algorithm is going to figure this out automatically: I follow the page of a movie that posts quotes and screengrabs from the film. Like the comics in a newspaper, these snippets are a familiar and beneficial part of my perusal of Facebook: they are part of what I enjoy about visiting the website. I never comment on the screengrabs, nor do I "like" them (I would rather others not know what sappy parts of the sappy movie I'm most connecting with today ;P)... I'm not even clicking them... I have no clue how Facebook would ever figure out I want to see those, all of those, if it is going to insist on ignoring my explicit "I want to follow this Page...
I've been doing some of this lately, but initially I did not follow most of my current likes because I wanted to see their content. Most of them are not things I ever explicitly "liked"! Facebook used to have areas of your profile where you listed your favorite movies, favorite bands, etc. At some point these got converted into follows of pages, without me opting in. When I said that I liked the band Coil, whose principals are now dead, I did not thereby imply that I intended to follow some profiteering asshole who controls their Facebook "Page". And yet that's what happened. I do unfollow these when they show up in my feed with objectionable content. But I think it's a mistake to assume that people want to see the content from the Pages they "follow" (admittedly, a mistake of Facebook's own making).
To be honest, I think everyone is just crying that "Facebook isn't showing my fans the stupid and unengaging crap that I post". How about trying some actual content that your fans might actually want to see? The one thing FB has become very adept at is filtering out crap.
If you post crap, users won't want to see your crap - would you want to see crap?
I agree with your post wholeheartedly.
The free lunch is over. Next, paid developer apis...
To me, though, that sounds like a dream marketing platform; one where you only have to pay for ads that do well, because you can push them for free to a small sample of your audience to test them.
Another possibility: if FB ever gets any good at figuring out from the content of a post who will like it, then a benevolent FB could show each post of yours to the 10% of your audience who actually wants to see it, but not spam them with the other 90%, which would make them stop following your page.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
both videos show why facebook's model is inherently self-destructive and incoherent and will inevitably implode
Which means Facebook will become increasingly cold and impersonal, like any other corporate entity.
If none of your non-paid posts are going to your social network of "likers", then you can't tell how useful having high likes on Facebook is. Then, what incentive is there for people to encourage people to "like" them of Facebook, to build the social network to eventually buy Facebook ads?
They are killing the goose that laid the golden egg by dialing down non-paid posts. Maybe large companies might continue to pay for ads, but new companies, or SMBs will completely lose incentive to build a Facebook following, since the ROI on building a Facebook following will be expensive and the result completely unpredictable.
And growth in advertising doesn't tell me anything. Most of the advertising market consists of a bubble in which all parties tell each other it's worth the money with very little evidence to show for it. But maybe that's just because I live in a bubble where advertising is mostly invisible.
>“Like many mediums, if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
That "Like many mediums" bit is a slap in the face. It's implying that those who would complain are unrealistic freeloaders or otherwise somehow at fault for their own declining engagement. This, even when it is really due to FB actively working to cause the decline.
Also, it completely pretends that FB has always been "like many mediums" and did not encourage like-activity, as well as re-inforce the benefits of said activity with previously higher levels of engagement.
The net message, essentially, is "why would you expect a free ride from FB, when you don't expect it anywhere else?"
Very snarky, condescending, and hostile.
People use Facebook to communicate with people that they know: liking a business or brand is a communication with friends, not with that business. You like something to put it on your profile, and put an entry on your newsfeed saying you like that thing. It's not to sign up to a newsletter.
Now Facebook has to make money so I am sure they will continue to change things to help advertisers reach people (for $$$). But there's no incentive to let companies engage in spammy practices - or at least, the grey area of unsolicited communication following an existing relationship - for free. In my view businesses who thought that somehow the rules had changed and that social networks meant free advertising forever, never had it right in the first place.
But isn't that exactly how Twitter works? And isn't that what Facebook users expect? To see all the posts of their friends and pages they Like?
But arguably now Facebook is so intrenched that it can remove some of this incentive and even profit of giving some of it back for a price.
Facebook is a scam! Greedy, calculated scam.
A musician friend on FB friend notes that posts containing the words "song" or "music" or that link to Soundcloud appear to get badly downvoted by the algorithm in casual tests he's done. Possible workaround: put your s*ngs on Youtube.
I am subscribed to many pages and I don't "like" or comment on every post that a page makes. Over a time I have seen that Facebook shows me more from pages where I like or comment to posts most often and the rest start to vanish from my timeline but if I go back to a page and interact with with a few posts, suddenly I start seeing content from that page on my newsfeed.
So what Facebook is doing makes sense. Yes as a page owner I would like to reach maximum audience, but engagement is also key. This will ensure as a page owner I create more engaging and interesting content so more people engage with my page organically.