Facebook Is Dying A Slow Death & Here’s Why
Business Reach
Companies over the last few years have spent millions of dollars investing in developing their Facebook following. You see this anywhere from Super Bowl ads to print ads driving consumers to like them instead of to their website. And how does Facebook repay these businesses? Make them pay to reach their full audience. Facebook claims that the reason why businesses reach is declining is because there is more competition in the news feed from friends and family etc. We call BS, we are seeing more and more ads in newsfeed. It seems as though these changes come at an interesting time, since Facebook went public and now is responsible for shareholders they are squeezing every penny out of users that can pay, and who is that… businesses.
Ads Galore
As we already mentioned, the newsfeed any every part of Facebook is becoming a slot for display ads. These come in many shapes and sizes, the sidebar and in the newsfeed pretending that its relevant to your life. Now that you can advertise on Facebook through re-targeting platforms like Adroll, the newsfeed is becoming more cluttered with ads. Facebook knows that this isn’t a good user experience, but they don’t care. They need to make more and more money each quarter.
Sloppy News Feed
Based on recent news feed algorithm changes, Facebook claims that it is curating the feed and providing the most relevant content. This sounds great, right? Wrong, they are forcing businesses into promoting content unnaturally instead of displaying the content in the feed, as it did previously. The news feed is now a mish mosh of fake viral news, occasional posts from friends, and ads. What used to be a great place to know what your friends are doing is now a feed of garbage consuming our time and wasting businesses money on promoted posts.
Privacy Concerns
Privacy concerns from end users continue to grow. Facebook is not helping itself in any way, shape or form here either. Their privacy policy evolves and become more and more vague giving them control over your data. News organizations keep running stories about how Facebook is stealing your data and accessing your phone lines, which is not the case, but strikes fear into consumers.
Summary
In summary, Facebook is losing businesses buy-in to their platform and will ultimately cost them money in the long-run. They are having such great short-term success with mobile ad revenue, but that comes at a cost. As for small and large business, increase your reach by picking a different social platform to focus on. Snicker’s recently published a clever piece of marketing during the FIFA World Cup after a player bit another during a match and published a post with an image that said “More Satisfying Than Italian”. They published on Twitter and Facebook at the same time and the reach was 13,000 more on Twitter. See the image below with 11 million fans on Facebook vs 50 thousand followers on Twitter. You be the judge on which platform is more effective.
