Facebook’s unethical behavior has always stood out to me, and one instance I’ll always remember is when Facebook started charging brands to reach their own audience. The audience that they had largely driven to Facebook. So in today’s video, I want to recap what happened and remind everyone what Facebook and now Meta really is at its core.
So let’s describe the, the, the situation. Facebook was great. What you had was companies, organizations, they were building up brand pages and originally the companies could reach or get their organic followers easily. And so what was happening was these companies were driving users to the Facebook platform to their page and they were encouraging people to like their page and encouraging people to engage with their content and to share it.
And so really a lot of different a lot of different entities were building up their brand pages as their communities. And so it worked really well because they could share news, they could offer promotions, and they could engage with their audience directly. But then Facebook changed its algorithm.
So, and the change really resulted in not being able to reach as many of your, as many of your followers, or as many of the people that liked your page, you weren’t able to reach them organically. So what happened was brand pages could now only reach some of their audience and it was a much, much smaller fraction.
So Facebook introduced promoted posts. And with this feature, brands could pay to boost the visibility of their posts, meaning they can now reach the people that they originally drove to the Facebook platform. And so. Some companies stayed with this and started paying Facebook. But it really was, this was a bait and switch because, and I say bait and switch because.
There were so many organizations who had really leveraged their reach and they had driven people to Facebook. And they encouraged people, their, their marketing was centered around Facebook and driving traffic to their brand pages. So not only did Facebook benefit from really these companies building up Facebook, right?
Facebook had started to become popular. What really helped Facebook turn the corner was when you had all of these entities driving traffic to brand pages and then encouraging people to use Facebook. So this helped Facebook reach audiences and people and different demographics that they weren’t reaching.
But so not only did Facebook benefit from this traffic, but then they also monetized. So they got free advertising. They got people to they got these companies educating people on how to use their platform. And then they turned around and charged the companies to reach the very audience that they had driven to the page.
And so contrast this to if the companies and these different brands had. Driven the traffic to let’s say an email capture page and invited them to subscribe via email So if they had done this then at least they would have had access to those customers without having to pay to reach those different Subscribers followers, etc Facebook did have a significant social benefit, right?
Facebook had a number of features So these features were useful But then they ended up being turned against the companies because they had to pay for them. Whereas originally they didn’t. So I think the better strategy would have been to make sure you have access to the customer and then drive. So funnel to an email list and then invite to Facebook.
But of course, at the time, Facebook was trendy and it was seen as, it started to be seen as a must for, for marketing campaigns and advertising campaigns. And so companies were focused on their Facebook pages, and so as a result, Facebook got a windfall in billions of dollars of free advertising, and then ended up…
Capitalizing on that windfall even more and, and started to monetize all of the free advertising. So it really was a true windfall and that’s really that’s really what I wanted to cover today and just remind because it’s easy to forget. And I, I really had a my memory was blurry as to what exactly happened, but I do remember at the moment when it did happen.
It was a significant change. And this was something where, you know, bigger corporations, they could roll with this and they just saw it as a cost of doing business, but for a lot of smaller businesses, this did, this did hurt, right? This was a very negative. And it did have a very negative impact on them.
Because they’d spent time, money, energy, effort driving people to Facebook and then weren’t able to reach those same people. And so, this is, this is really ugly behavior. And you just have to remember that this happened under Mark Zuckerberg and he’s still around. So, you have to, you have to expect the same kind of…
of mental framework and processing going around, you know, they did this originally, what would to stop, what would stop them from doing, from having this type of behavior again? So really unethical, but it did happen and it did really propel Facebook to the next level.