5 ms·

What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other social media) page on their site: 1. You're advertising another company for free.

What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other social media) page on their site: 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business. 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page. 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people). - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors: 1. You are in control of your list. 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.

geocar 11y ago
People are much less likely to enter in their email address and join a mailing list about dishsoap, than they are to click a "like" button next to an advertisement for dishsoap. That you can pay Facebook to reach those people again has value, that's why people do it.
- randycupertino 11y ago
  Huh. I do the opposite. I might sign up for direct emails about dishsoap, but I'd be too embarrassed to let facebook spam all my friends that I like melonball cotton candy dishsoap, so I'll NEVER publicly "like" it. I'm really meticulous about only liking things that I don't mind if people know I support the company/product. So, basically I like my coffeehouse and my dive bar and that's about it.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Note: Facebook is quite inconspicuous about displaying fanpage likes; i.e. your friends will probably miss the information that you've liked some fanpage. Each of your friends most likely has hundreds of books, movies and commercial venues liked (you can check that in their profile), and you probably haven't seen a single one of them popping up on your timeline.
    - randycupertino 11y ago
      Really? Interesting, because I get spammed pretty constantly that my friends "liked" Barkbox or whatever stupid MLM pyramid scheme is the current fad in my newsfeed pretty constantly. In fact, the Barkbox one shows up almost every few days. Is that just because Barkbox is advertising on facebook? I always thought if I liked anything it would reciprocatively show up in their newsfeeds.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It depends on number of friends and your general feed load. What I've noticed is that articles you've liked tend to show more often on others' feeds than fanpages you liked. Also, the latter used to be a smaller notification. I think recently it's more visible because they started to show summaries of selected posts under the fanpage name.
      - ehnto 11y ago
        You might find that those are actually sponsored advertisements in your feed. You might also notice it's often the same people who have liked it. They didn't like it right then and there, it's just that an advert is showing and FB pulls up people you can relate to as others who recommend it.
        randycupertino 11y ago
        Damn, I think you're right. I guess because I am always posting pictures of my dog facebook really thinks I want to get him Barkbox! Fortunately I know Barkbox is overpriced junk. I don't know why I keep getting targeted for MLM schemes other than a bunch of my idiot frat buddies quit their jobs to sell MLM junk a few years ago and keep trying to get me roped into their "downlines."
        ehnto 11y ago
        Oh it's not a pyramid scheme though. Think of it as more of a circle. A circle of unity. And in the middle of the circle of unity is us, the early adopters. All we have to do is give Xenu all of our material belongings and buckle in for the incredible rewards coming our way!
- tdkl 11y ago
  They do both, but Facebook version is more appealing with the added drama to it because of comments. People, especially those with narcissistic tendencies are attracted to drama. FB (and other social networks) evolved this to new extremes.
yoz-y 11y ago
At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless I do think that it is better than having an e-mail. There are several reasons for that: - First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service. - People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook, they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc. - The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed gets pretty close to that. - People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail if they can have everything in their feed? - If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you - administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of this on somebody else) - I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing lists and also requires less tools. - Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are, the more you can reach. - Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are quite cheap. - I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail. Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github (issue tracker, code reviews).
- inthewoods 11y ago
  "At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished" Have you looked at a stock chart of Facebook recently? All time high basically and worth $220b. Or did you mean the value the company brings to the user?
  - throwaway125 11y ago
    You misread what was said I think. It's about a facebook like, not about facebook itself.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself. Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are. > 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. Facebook is not trapping anyone inside. If you mean that you can't contact them out-of-band, then well, that's by design and actually a feature. > If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business. Most businesses come to the rational conclusion that this almost never happens, and the small risk is worth being where the customers are. > 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page. That is totally by design and again, very much a feature. For some reasons businesses think they're entitled to "reaching out" to people with their unsolicited offers. They're not. We don't want your spam. Neither your, nor that of any of hundreds of companies we deal with every month. The etiquette here is the Hollywood principle - don't call us, we'll call you. > 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people). It's actually simpler than writing quality e-mails, or quality snailmails. There is some additional work because people will reach out to you more through Facebook than through conventional channels, and you need someone to handle the communication. > - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors: > 1. You are in control of your list. Which is something we, the customers, don't want. > 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free. And that we absolutely, positively don't want most of the time. I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.
- return0 11y ago
  > That is totally by design and again, very much a feature. No, it wasnt like that when most of the Pages acquired the bulk of their followers, they could reach all their audience freely. It was a shitty idea solely to make money, it didn't "add value" to users. There were other, more meaningful ways to implement this, e.g. show Page posts on a separate tab, have limits of posts/day etc. Paying for views is a bad strategy to improve quality; imagine if HN worked like that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
snowwrestler 11y ago
People spend way more time in Facebook than email, and (paradoxically) it's way easier to get them to like a Facebook page than to enter their email address in a form and hit submit. So yes, email is great, but marketing is multi-channel or pointless. Facebook is the single biggest channel out there. Yes, you have to invest some $$ in Facebook to get above the noise floor, but again: that's marketing. Email costs money too. Nothing comes for free.

geocar 11y ago

People are much less likely to enter in their email address and join a mailing list about dishsoap, than they are to click a "like" button next to an advertisement for dishsoap. That you can pay Facebook to reach those people again has value, that's why people do it.

randycupertino 11y ago
Huh. I do the opposite. I might sign up for direct emails about dishsoap, but I'd be too embarrassed to let facebook spam all my friends that I like melonball cotton candy dishsoap, so I'll NEVER publicly "like" it. I'm really meticulous about only liking things that I don't mind if people know I support the company/product. So, basically I like my coffeehouse and my dive bar and that's about it.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Note: Facebook is quite inconspicuous about displaying fanpage likes; i.e. your friends will probably miss the information that you've liked some fanpage. Each of your friends most likely has hundreds of books, movies and commercial venues liked (you can check that in their profile), and you probably haven't seen a single one of them popping up on your timeline.
  - randycupertino 11y ago
    Really? Interesting, because I get spammed pretty constantly that my friends "liked" Barkbox or whatever stupid MLM pyramid scheme is the current fad in my newsfeed pretty constantly. In fact, the Barkbox one shows up almost every few days. Is that just because Barkbox is advertising on facebook? I always thought if I liked anything it would reciprocatively show up in their newsfeeds.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It depends on number of friends and your general feed load. What I've noticed is that articles you've liked tend to show more often on others' feeds than fanpages you liked. Also, the latter used to be a smaller notification. I think recently it's more visible because they started to show summaries of selected posts under the fanpage name.
    - ehnto 11y ago
      You might find that those are actually sponsored advertisements in your feed. You might also notice it's often the same people who have liked it. They didn't like it right then and there, it's just that an advert is showing and FB pulls up people you can relate to as others who recommend it.
      - randycupertino 11y ago
        Damn, I think you're right. I guess because I am always posting pictures of my dog facebook really thinks I want to get him Barkbox! Fortunately I know Barkbox is overpriced junk. I don't know why I keep getting targeted for MLM schemes other than a bunch of my idiot frat buddies quit their jobs to sell MLM junk a few years ago and keep trying to get me roped into their "downlines."
        ehnto 11y ago
        Oh it's not a pyramid scheme though. Think of it as more of a circle. A circle of unity. And in the middle of the circle of unity is us, the early adopters. All we have to do is give Xenu all of our material belongings and buckle in for the incredible rewards coming our way!
tdkl 11y ago
They do both, but Facebook version is more appealing with the added drama to it because of comments. People, especially those with narcissistic tendencies are attracted to drama. FB (and other social networks) evolved this to new extremes.

yoz-y 11y ago

At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless I do think that it is better than having an e-mail. There are several reasons for that: - First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service. - People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook, they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc. - The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed gets pretty close to that. - People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail if they can have everything in their feed? - If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you - administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of this on somebody else) - I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing lists and also requires less tools. - Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are, the more you can reach. - Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are quite cheap. - I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail. Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github (issue tracker, code reviews).

inthewoods 11y ago
"At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished" Have you looked at a stock chart of Facebook recently? All time high basically and worth $220b. Or did you mean the value the company brings to the user?
- throwaway125 11y ago
  You misread what was said I think. It's about a facebook like, not about facebook itself.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No. First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself. Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are. > 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. Facebook is not trapping anyone inside. If you mean that you can't contact them out-of-band, then well, that's by design and actually a feature. > If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business. Most businesses come to the rational conclusion that this almost never happens, and the small risk is worth being where the customers are. > 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page. That is totally by design and again, very much a feature. For some reasons businesses think they're entitled to "reaching out" to people with their unsolicited offers. They're not. We don't want your spam. Neither your, nor that of any of hundreds of companies we deal with every month. The etiquette here is the Hollywood principle - don't call us, we'll call you. > 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people). It's actually simpler than writing quality e-mails, or quality snailmails. There is some additional work because people will reach out to you more through Facebook than through conventional channels, and you need someone to handle the communication. > - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors: > 1. You are in control of your list. Which is something we, the customers, don't want. > 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free. And that we absolutely, positively don't want most of the time. I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.

return0 11y ago
> That is totally by design and again, very much a feature. No, it wasnt like that when most of the Pages acquired the bulk of their followers, they could reach all their audience freely. It was a shitty idea solely to make money, it didn't "add value" to users. There were other, more meaningful ways to implement this, e.g. show Page posts on a separate tab, have limits of posts/day etc. Paying for views is a bad strategy to improve quality; imagine if HN worked like that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

snowwrestler 11y ago

People spend way more time in Facebook than email, and (paradoxically) it's way easier to get them to like a Facebook page than to enter their email address in a form and hit submit. So yes, email is great, but marketing is multi-channel or pointless. Facebook is the single biggest channel out there. Yes, you have to invest some $$ in Facebook to get above the noise floor, but again: that's marketing. Email costs money too. Nothing comes for free.