How Facebook double-crossed the businesses

By Mark August 2, 2016April 29, 2018 3 min read

I’m assuming that you live under a rock and you think that the big corporations have their constitutes best interest at heart. I’m also presuming that you think that social media is a big happy teddy-bear meeting-place where lolly-pops and barbie-dolls go to kiss and hug.

Now anyone who is part of the aforementioned “assume-ers”, please leave my website. Really. GO AWAY. NOW. SERIOUSLY.

The thought of the rattling that must go on in your empty brain as you jump up and down is giving me a headache.

You don’t belong on this website. You’d be better off reading a fluff-piece about your favorite celebrity. Maybe an article about how she just got into a “real” feud with another one of your favorite celebrities. Or maybe you’d prefer to follow the politics.

The Double Cross

This article is about how Facebook double-crossed the very people who enabled their company to catapult from merely a passing-phase, and transform into one of the most powerful businesses on the planet.

Quick history: Facebook started off as a lackluster online platform for people to connect with each other. Friends chatted with friends. Family kept in touch with each other. Everyone ate rainbows.

Blah, blah and blah.

Facebook grew. Businesses realized that they could use the Facebook platform as a way to reach potential customers, and they went crazy. Facebook caught onto the hype that the businesses were generating within Facebook and rewarded them by enabling their business posts to rank high within Facebook. Facebook boomed. (In September of 2012 Facebook hit 1 billion users.)

Facebook’s Greed Algorithm

Soon after, greed set in.

They offered businesses the opportunity to reach more fans, but this time they added a heavy cost. Trust me, it added up. Many businesses paid in excess of $100,000s. These fan pages had 100,000s of fans, and these fans interacted with and followed these pages.

The businesses were upset by the price to gather fans, but they understood that gathering followers should cost them something.

And then Facebook ran their first set of “algorithm changes”.

“Algorithm changes” sounds innocent. But it is everything but that. “Algorithm change” means that they demoted the posts and made them less visible to their fans. The fans, let me remind you again, that these businesses paid dearly to acquire.

You would imagine that there would be an uproar. There wasn’t.

There was barely a sound. No one complained.

The early algorithm changes were so subtle that no one noticed anything until much later.

Soon Facebook rolled out more “algorithm changes”, and by time businesses understood what was going on, it was too late to do fight back. The viewership of the average post dropped to 15% of what it had been and the heavy investment that had been made to gather all the fans was almost entirely wasted.