Yesterday, Friday, morning I posted the beast of social response and feedback posts. Of the top three grossing movies out, what are your reviews, reactions, likes, hates. And I got ZERO responses. ZERO.
Now there are several possible reasons for this.
- It wasn’t a very interesting topic
- I posted too early in the morning to get the “initial” LIKE that FB needs to keep showing a post
- FB only showed it to two “friends” ever
- My friends hate me and would never respond to such a silly request for their opinions.
Have my Facebook friends become so apathetic that they won’t comment on a simple movie review? Much less a triple-header movie opinion request? I don’t think that’s the issue. They seem to be commenting and making review posts about all three of these movies. So, why wouldn’t they join in, on a post like this?
Turns out, conversations are not happening on Facebook like they used to. And the primary reason, is you need a gaggle of people to carry on an interesting conversation. As Facebook begins to limit your “connected friends” to about 20 or so, total, your conversational topics also shrink in proportion to your “group” or “audience” or “close Facebook friends.”
But they are not “friends,” right? We know this. Facebook has reduced our interactions with “friends” to algorithms that will produce the most advertising opportunities. Have a quiet friend who rarely interacts on Facebook, they are not considered a high-value “friend” and will not be shown often. Got a friend like me, who posts all the fricken time, and you choose to ignore or “not interact” with my content, then I too begin to fall from your “close friends” list. Facebook wants to show you stuff you will click on. Facebook wants to get you LIKE-ing your friend’s stuff, so you get in the mood/habit of LIKE-ing and then they want to show you a lot of “paid content” so you will LIKE it too. That’s how Facebook makes money. Facebook is paid to deliver you and your friends as advertising targets. That’s it. That’s the 100% solution that drives all of Facebook’s actions regarding privacy, sharing, likes, hides, blocks, etc. It is all to get you to see and buy stuff that advertisers are paying Facebook to put into your feed.
Wonder why so much of your feed is now uninteresting? Wonder why only about 2% of it is generated by any of your “friends?” Because your friends aren’t paying Facebook to show you their content. I’m not paying Facebook to boost this simple movie review question to my friends. So based on Facebook’s value-proposition, my post is worthless, and your comments or responses to it are also worthless because they don’t lead towards any transaction. Perhaps if I had TAGGED the movies. Or used text with the official links to the movies rather than an image. Perhaps I could’ve done things to make Facebook pay attention to my little movie review request.
But I’m not really a Facebook customer. I’m a Facebook user. I do promote and push a lot of content (all original and unpaid, by the way) to Facebook as a way to reach followers and friends who are interested in my activities. And yes, I have paid the $5 boost fee to actually show a post to more than 5 of 1,000 followers of one of my business pages. But not often. I don’t think paying Facebook is helping my business. I think paying Facebook is asking Facebook to behave like a social network, and show my content to people who are asking to see it.
Facebook is committing suicide by monetizing every last drop of humanity out of Facebook. This was/is a perfect social post. But Facebook’s AI missed it. And thus none of my friends saw the post. And thus it becomes a dead message, lost in a sea of millions of dead messages, that never reach any destination.
Facebook is teaching us that reaching out on Facebook is fruitless. And perhaps this is the gift of the death of Facebook. The snake eating itself becomes a symbol of how self-interested Facebook is on Facebook. And we keep using it because there’s nothing yet that has risen to the occasion to provide a NEW SOCIAL PLATFORM. But, it will come. There are too many smart people out there to let the Microsofts, Apples Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons of the world, run and ruin everything for us.
There has got to be a new place built for actual social interaction online because this one is dead.
John McElhenney – let’s connect online
@jmacofearth & Google+ & Facebook & LinkedIn
more from uber.la
- Data Selfie – What the Internet Marketers Know About You
- Lifehack Quickie: Off-time Strategies
- How Does Facebook Suck? If It’s Free You Are the Product
- Does Type-A Always Mean Asshole?
sources:
- Why We’re Ending Our Love Affair with Slack and Facebook – The Happy Startup School on Medium
