Facebook is the ever escaping mystery. As we think it now becomes a ‘mature’ company, it is more than ever in state of flux. It is closing failed initiatives like ‘Places’ (a copy of Foursquare), or ‘Deals’ (a copy of Groupon), which seems to fall outside of its fundamental revenue model: a mostly self-service ads-based or transaction-share revenue. Both Places & Deals don’t do well on a self-service model: it requires real sales people out there to convince merchants to sign-up.
Lately, Facebook has also been trying to reconcile itselfs with advertisers, and developers. Over the last 2 years, a little drama has been unfolding. In the period 2006-2009, Facebook has been luring 100′s of developpers, and advertisers to create applications, pages, and get crowds of people to sign up. The promise was twofolded:
- Instant sign-up: people who register to your application/page don’t need to go through lengthy processes
- Virality: many actions get published on a user wall, bringing instant virality to the page or app, quickly bringing their friends into the game, app, or page
It worked. Some applications rocketed to 60 Millions users over a month without marketing, and most popular pages reached as well millions. Then, mid-2009, Facebook decided to introduce a number of rules changes to what was published or not on the people’s newsfeed, previously showing a simple reverse chronological list of activities: the ‘Top news’ section on the Newsfeed. Contrary to the ‘Recent news’, this section is supposed to make an educated guess about the content that you’ll probably find most relevant. The annoying part is that the algorithm deciding on ‘what’s relevant’ was not published, & even less transparent (there has been some interesting attempts at reverse-engineering it). Even if it was, I doubted it could actually be correct: I might find a post absolutely great, the next silly, and do nothing on any of the two – still any algorithm would not treat them differently.
Obviously this got many developers to fall into disgrace: all those nice (or annoying) updates, including how well your friends performed at this or that game, were suddenly hidden for most. The same happened for brand pages. Actually, if you compare quickly what you see on your ‘Top news’ and ‘Recent news’, you’ll discover that some people or pages never really quite make it to your ‘Top news’. Bad luck: ‘Top news’ is the default filter. At that time I was piloting a small Facebook application and I instantly hated it.
Marketers hate that. They were supposed to build a page as the easiest, viral way to build audience of followers, who would then see regular updates, promotions, helping thus the brand to remain ‘top of mind’, sell more or whatever. They even paid Facebook ads to get more members. They paid agencies to run the community. And then, those ‘fans’ don’t even see the updates? Tough luck.
With the threat of Google Plus & other, nimble & mobile-based social network rising quickly, Facebook has finally noticed – it seems some changes are cooking. I even had a ‘full activity stream’ on the right hand side of the screen for a couple of days (now gone).
The point for marketers is: you should get a community of followers, but don’t count on big numbers. What matters are the ‘high-engaged’: people who comment, like your products are those who will for sure continue to see your updates. The good news is that those are the ones that matter, because they will give the precious testimonials, and they typically have larger base of friends/followers themselves. The other lesson is: don’t rely solely on Facebook to build a community: use other social network, own site social solutions, & simple email registrations.
Yet, Facebook, is playing too many games, and already behaving like Microsoft did when it became dominant (the shift from dynamic changes to ruthless, arrogant moves, goes really quickly). It needs now to get back on track for a simple rule called transparency: give simple rules & stick to them. Don’t play games with your most important stakholders: advertisers & developers.
PS/ apologies for little publishing over the last months. I intend to go back to a rythm of biweekly publishing.
alexvdm
