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A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

blog.eat24hours.com

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Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#61

Post by eertami »

ryandrake wrote: post #37
belorn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Eat24 is mad that Facebook are demanding money to carry Eat24 contents for free. If spotify started to demand money for artists rather than pay them, artists would start to get angry.

I'm not sure I understand the difference between " ads" and " 's content". Facebook is a promotional platform. Content posted there by companies are advertisements, nearly by definition.

But doesn't it change things slightly if you are subscribing to these advertisements?

The new Facebook algorithm is kind of like signing up (liking) to a newsletter and then only receiving it every 10th edition.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#62

Post by evgen »

sparkzilla wrote: post #58
morgante wrote: post #53

Honestly I still don't get the hubbub over this algorithm change by Facebook. It's a scaling issue Facebook is attempting to solve, in a dramatically different (and IMHO superior) way than Twitter. On both networks, every time you look at your feed you'll only look at the top X items. On Twitter, that'll just be the X most recent items. On Facebook, those X items are picked algorithmically based on the degree of enga…

No. Just no. Like many other small businesses, I paid thousands of dollars to Facebook for ads to create fan pages. People who were interested in what I was doing became fans (I had about 4000 in all). There was never any indication from Facebook that they would make it increasingly difficult to reach those people, and those fans were never told that they would not see my posts. Due to changes in their algorithm I wa…

The fact that I liked your page last year does not mean that I stil want a constant stream of your store updates and coupons. The amount of stuff that can be put onto my Facebook news feed is finite, and the number of people who think they have some entitlement to that space because of a single action they convinced me to take in the distant past is constantly growing. You didn't do anything to grow Facebook other than try to use it as a cheap advertising channel and I would rather Facebook try to figure out wha I need/want than to have my news feed cluttered by everyone whose page I ever liked.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#63

Post by auxbuss »

sergiotapia wrote: post #52
frostmatthew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can pay to promote a post so it will have a higher reach. Businesses should be more appreciative of the fact that 5-10% reach for free is far more free reach than you will get with TV, radio, Google ads, or anything else short of putting flyers on telephone poles.

Well, no. I disagree with what you're saying. If I create a page for my business and share coupons and stuff, people are free to come like my page. That means they want to see more of my stuff voluntarily. Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what they want to see?

Because Facebook is an advertising business. So it's not extortion; it's their business model.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#64

Post by evgen »

sergiotapia wrote: post #52
frostmatthew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can pay to promote a post so it will have a higher reach. Businesses should be more appreciative of the fact that 5-10% reach for free is far more free reach than you will get with TV, radio, Google ads, or anything else short of putting flyers on telephone poles.

Well, no. I disagree with what you're saying. If I create a page for my business and share coupons and stuff, people are free to come like my page. That means they want to see more of my stuff voluntarily. Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what they want to see?

No, it does my mean they want to see a constant stream of every promotion and sale you offer. It means that they liked _one thing_ and your page is no different than the thousand other things I have liked last month. You don't have some entitlement to space on my feed. If I am interested then a constant stream of likes to your content will keep you in view. If you convinced me and ten thousand others to like a single cat picture that does not mean I want to see anything else you post. I may like your television advertisement, but that is not why I turn on the tv or select a particular channel.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#65

Post by frostmatthew »

sergiotapia wrote: post #52
frostmatthew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can pay to promote a post so it will have a higher reach. Businesses should be more appreciative of the fact that 5-10% reach for free is far more free reach than you will get with TV, radio, Google ads, or anything else short of putting flyers on telephone poles.

Well, no. I disagree with what you're saying. If I create a page for my business and share coupons and stuff, people are free to come like my page. That means they want to see more of my stuff voluntarily. Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what they want to see?

It's not "extortion" - Facebook is under no obligation to provide businesses with 100% reach (or indeed any reach) for free. Facebook is not a non-profit or some government service - they are a business. And just like you want to make money for your business, they want to make money for theirs. [And if they don't make money they go out of business and that certainly won't increase your reach]

IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses - if the only option was pay for reach nobody would be complaining. Because there has always been some amount of free reach there's an odd sense of entitlement.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#67

Post by evgen »

nickgrosvenor wrote: post #51

This is why Facebook is buying other companies because people are migrating away from Facebook. One flaw Facebook has, when everyone's been on it for years they collect hundreds of friends from random old parts of their life. This waters down the experience because random people you barely know posting all the time turns your feed into something less interesting. Toss in more ads combined with old acquaintances, and…

You realize that at the same time as the occulus rift purchase they announced one billion mobile users, right? No one is moving away from facebook. Everyone has anecdotes but the financial filings have real numbers. They may not be growing at the rates they were in the past, but that was inevitable.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#68

Post by j2kun »

The algorithm they describe is apparently called "EdgeRank." All I can find via Google are really bad infographics and worse layman explanations (ones that make it clear the writer doesn't understand basic graph theory, or is adulterating their understanding for whatever reason).

Can anyone post a link to a research-level paper explaining the algorithm? The name EdgeRank makes me think it's a ripoff of PageRank, so are they solving some sort of eigensystem for, what, an incidence matrix instead of an adjacency matrix?

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#69

Post by sparkzilla »

morgante wrote: post #60
sparkzilla wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Just no. Like many other small businesses, I paid thousands of dollars to Facebook for ads to create fan pages. People who were interested in what I was doing became fans (I had about 4000 in all). There was never any indication from Facebook that they would make it increasingly difficult to reach those people, and those fans were never told that they would not see my posts. Due to changes in their algorithm I wa…

Instead of resorting to emotion, can you explain a compelling alternative for how Facebook could actually solve this? Yes, you have 4000 fans. But I'm 99% sure you're not the only page they like. They probably like many other pages, and also have many other friends (2 numbers that increase over time). Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me? This is purely a problem of s…

Facebook started to throttle response just over a year ago, well after most people already had all of their friends in their feed, and well after most people had joined most of the pages they like.

It's no coincidence that Facebook told me I could get more views by spending money to reach the same people I had been reaching organically just a few weeks before.

The solution is to stop trying to extort money from the businesses that helped them build their business and let the users decide what they want to see.

Re: A Breakup Letter to Facebook from Eat24

#70

Post by unclebucknasty »

morgante wrote: post #60
sparkzilla wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Just no. Like many other small businesses, I paid thousands of dollars to Facebook for ads to create fan pages. People who were interested in what I was doing became fans (I had about 4000 in all). There was never any indication from Facebook that they would make it increasingly difficult to reach those people, and those fans were never told that they would not see my posts. Due to changes in their algorithm I wa…

Instead of resorting to emotion, can you explain a compelling alternative for how Facebook could actually solve this? Yes, you have 4000 fans. But I'm 99% sure you're not the only page they like. They probably like many other pages, and also have many other friends (2 numbers that increase over time). Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me? This is purely a problem of s…

>Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?

And requiring people to pay to reach fans somehow magically fixes this? Does the payment requirement somehow supercede the best algorithms in perfectly balancing post activity? And, do brands with deeper pockets somehow automatically have the most compelling content?

Do you sincerely believe that this is all about solving that problem and it just happens to have a very positive impact on Facebook's bottom line?

>But organic growth also still works.

This statement is obviously and mathematically less true than it once was. Reaching one fan organically does not mean organic "works". Degree matters here and a much smaller percentage of posts organically reach fans than at a previous time. Somewhere between zero and 100, the degree of organic efficacy becomes a non-starter for companies who previously answered Facebook's call to engage with fans for free, and are now required to pay an untenable amount to reach them.

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