Frustrated Facebook marketers might have found their patron saint. Eat24, a take-out food delivery app, has announced that it is deleting its Facebook page with a very funny Dear John letter to the social network.
Dear Facebook, Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk. This isn’t easy to say since we’ve been together so long, but we need to break up. We’d love to say “It’s not you, it’s us” but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot. When we first met, you made us feel special. We’d tell you a super funny joke about Sriracha and you’d tell all our friends and then everyone would laugh together. But now? Now you want us to give you money if we want to talk to our friends. Now when we show you a photo of a taco wrapped with bacon, you’re all like “PROMOTE THIS POST! GET MORE FRIENDS!” instead of just liking us for who we are. That’s hella messed up.
Humor aside — and Eat24 insists that its planned Facebook page deletion at 11:59 tonight is no April Fool’s stunt — Eat24 has tapped into a serious vein of anger among marketers who are trying to use Facebook to organically reach customers.
Eat24’s complaints are familiar to anyone following Facebook’s recent News Feed changes. That few of the 70,000 people who have liked Eat24’s page see a given post, that paying to promote posts hasn’t boosted engagement, that many new likers of the page were non-U.S. users, that algorithm changes seem capricious and random, et cetera.
So Eat24 plans to focus its social media efforts elsewhere, on networks where it believes connections with customers are simpler. Like Twitter and Instagram: “They don’t have weird algorithms, which means all of our besties get to see everything we post. You might have noticed that when Ellen decided to take a selfie of beautiful people being beautiful, she did it on Twitter. And she got so many RTs, she broke it. The whole site went down. When was the last time you got that much action?”
Facebook, of course, has a daunting task: sorting through posts from its more than 1 billion active users — individuals and brands — and presenting a unique, relevant mix on those users’ News Feeds. Just because someone liked a brand page at some point doesn’t mean that he or she wants to see every post from that page. And competition for spots in a user’s Facebook feed is fierce, as Facebook director of communications Brandon McCormick noted in a comment on Eat24’s Facebook page:
Will that argument convince detractors? Probably not, but here’s some ironic food for thought: Eat24’s Facebook post about quitting Facebook is doing great on the social network with more 17,000 likes on the blog post and 2,000 likes, 1,000 shares and 600 comments on the soon-to-be-deleted Facebook page.
Postscript: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Eat24’s Facebook page has 90,000 likes.
Comments