151–160 of 195 posts
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>>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.
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.
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 t…
Using your blog or whatever to make specious (I assume) arguments about what someone else should/should not be doing with their business is your prerogative. Just don't expect people to actually listen to what you're saying while you beat them over the head with ads for trucks and cooking shows.
Again, I didn't read the whole thing, or even half before I bailed. But am I wrong in assuming this site uses the popular activity of Facebashing(tm) as a ploy to shove ads at unsuspecting visitors?
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 i…
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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 fo…
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…
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.
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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 fo…
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 cus…
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.)
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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 fo…
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 cus…
Serious bait-and-switch in the title. He want control of his fans , his like-ees. Not his (Facebook) "friends". Most of us know that is not a bug but a feature. Now the problem that Facebook makes it to share one's email address with one's own real Facebook friends is annoying and something to complain about. But trying to leverage that to complain about not being able to push your feed is problematic. This is exactl…
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As a rule, I don't "Like" sites, but I was unaware that it actually meant "subscribe me to this."
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 th…
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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 w…