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Facebook's encouragement of businesses to build FB pages, then have their own customers like them on Facebook seemed like a win-win--a mutual leveraging of cro

Facebook's encouragement of businesses to build FB pages, then have their own customers like them on Facebook seemed like a win-win--a mutual leveraging of cross-engagement. But, Facebook's later flipping the switch to make those businesses pay to reach their own customers was a completely underhanded bait-and-switch. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth all of these years later.

NicoJuicy 10y ago
I absolutely agree. Also, the 'find people by their likes' is just good in theory. All of your likes are going to be of people who share everything
- Ntrails 10y ago
  They probably also have 1000+ friends, half of whom have hidden their activity because it's all spam
searine 10y ago
Hard lesson for companies that you need to own your subscribers, not lease them from twitter/facebook/instagram.
- stevesearer 10y ago
  This is why I'm hesitant to switch my business Instagram account to be an official business page. I don't sell anything so the ecommerce/insight tools don't really appeal, but I can definitely see the future of having to "boost" posts to you followers.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  What's worse is that it's "buying" them (via hard-won marketing efforts), giving them to FB, then paying FB to lease them back. But, of course, that wasn't the original deal--else no one would have signed up for it.
shostack 10y ago
Yeah, this was not great. I worry Google might do something similar with email and their attempt to curate it with Inbox and the growth of ads in Gmail. They have the ability to control access and marketers currently pay a known fixed or tiered price for sending email to somewhat reliably reach their full target list (minus bounces). I'm sure Google is salivating over turning that into a dynamic auction based model with them as the gate keeper of one of the most widespread and valuable email clients out there.
blazespin 10y ago
This not the case at all. Forexample, there are cartoons that up very high in my feed because I click on them every day. If you something of quality that your users want, you don't have to pay to get to see. In fact they will share.
kalleboo 10y ago
But meanwhile Facebook users have proven to be completely unwilling to curate their own feed, so if Facebook didn't curate which pages you saw stuff from, everyone would leave Facebook because "it's all just ads".
jackgolding 10y ago
How is this different to Google encouraging SEO and making crawler friendly websites then adding 4 ads on top of organic results? Especially for branded content! In the industries I've worked in we've seen organic search as a % traffic drop due to competitor (and our own) PPC.

NicoJuicy 10y ago

I absolutely agree. Also, the 'find people by their likes' is just good in theory. All of your likes are going to be of people who share everything

Ntrails 10y ago
They probably also have 1000+ friends, half of whom have hidden their activity because it's all spam

searine 10y ago

Hard lesson for companies that you need to own your subscribers, not lease them from twitter/facebook/instagram.

stevesearer 10y ago
This is why I'm hesitant to switch my business Instagram account to be an official business page. I don't sell anything so the ecommerce/insight tools don't really appeal, but I can definitely see the future of having to "boost" posts to you followers.
unclebucknasty 10y ago
What's worse is that it's "buying" them (via hard-won marketing efforts), giving them to FB, then paying FB to lease them back. But, of course, that wasn't the original deal--else no one would have signed up for it.

shostack 10y ago

Yeah, this was not great. I worry Google might do something similar with email and their attempt to curate it with Inbox and the growth of ads in Gmail. They have the ability to control access and marketers currently pay a known fixed or tiered price for sending email to somewhat reliably reach their full target list (minus bounces). I'm sure Google is salivating over turning that into a dynamic auction based model with them as the gate keeper of one of the most widespread and valuable email clients out there.

blazespin 10y ago

This not the case at all. Forexample, there are cartoons that up very high in my feed because I click on them every day. If you something of quality that your users want, you don't have to pay to get to see. In fact they will share.

kalleboo 10y ago

But meanwhile Facebook users have proven to be completely unwilling to curate their own feed, so if Facebook didn't curate which pages you saw stuff from, everyone would leave Facebook because "it's all just ads".

jackgolding 10y ago

How is this different to Google encouraging SEO and making crawler friendly websites then adding 4 ads on top of organic results? Especially for branded content! In the industries I've worked in we've seen organic search as a % traffic drop due to competitor (and our own) PPC.