Facebook continues to make missteps with both their users
and business partners. How many times can they afford to make bad business
decisions before businesses and or users, abandon the social media platform. In the latest inadvertent admission by Facebook revealed that
organic reach is falling dramatically and falling short on reach. Why this is
occurring and their response is flabbergasting. Yes, I used the word
flabbergasting.
To set
the stage, the news was discovered in a pitch deck that found its way to Ad
Age. The deck contained several statements explaining the shift, "expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to
gradually decline over time" and paid distribution "to maximize
delivery of your message in news feed" and finally "Your brand
can fully benefit from having fans when most of your ads show social context,
which increases advertising effectiveness and efficiency,"
In
sum, Facebook is attempting to further monetize the platform while compromising
their initial mission and vision:
Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and
make the world more open and connected.
This new direction will only empower sharing of content from
large advertisers and organizations that can afford to advertise on the
platform. Additionally, content that will be exposed to users will be selected
based on this algorithmic system that is skewed towards paid content. Content
that could be valuable for users to share will be either scarce or never
exposed. As a direct result, advertisers will move to other platforms that
allow for their content to be properly exposed and shared at the discretion of
the user.
Consumers are becoming savvy to platform's control and
influence and do not like when knowing their content exposure is being
controlled or selected for them. They want to control the type, frequency and
means as to what content exposure they receive. Will Facebook backtrack on this
new model or will they just continue to believe that the platform is too large
that missteps like this will not receive dire results. I guess we will wait and
see how the fallout plays itself out.
Michael Newhouse
WCNgroup
wcngroup@gmail.com
Teens In The UK Are Calling It: Facebook Is Dead And Buried
ReplyDeleteRead more: http://www.businessinsider.com/teens-in-the-uk-say-facebook-is-dead-2013-12#ixzz2od5yZj2T