How Using Facebook Could Inadvertently be Upsetting Your Friends
It’s easy to see how you could advertently upset people by misusing (or using if you’re that way inclined) the features made available by Facebook. There was also always a chance that you could do this accidentally, but there now seems to be a distinct possibility that upsetting people unintentionally may become a whole lot easier.
There’s a big hoo-ha at the moment regarding Facebook’s policy to lower organic reach percentages. Presumably this is in the hope that users will begin to pay / pay more to maintain previous levels of reach – or beyond. You may have noticed that for some time on some pages that we’re now being invited to “boost” posts. After editing a page’s aesthetics you might begin to be encouraged to “Finish Your Page Promotion” with an incentive, such as “If you complete your Page likes advert, for $10.00, you could get 10–41 people to like your Page every day”.
Feeling left out?
People may begin to become upset if all of their friends are informed of an event when they weren’t – even though the information was posted for all to see. This has already happened to me, albeit in a mild way, when I was accused of not inviting a particular friend to a get-together. There was no danger of him not coming, as I texted him closer to the date to ask him if he was coming along. He claimed he knew nothing about it even though he is an avid Facebooker. Everyone else had spotted it, so should I attribute this to new policy?
The subject of my last article on this blog focused on other social media platforms catching up behind Facebook. How many of these will ask its user base to fund its stakeholders? How long will it be before we either all pay to maintain parity, or Facebook hits a wall?
Facebook is pushing the profit angle as far as it will go, but a backlash will come when people seek or create alternative tools to market their events.
I think you’re right, and it doesn’t really upset me much!
People have talked about rebelling against facebook for years now. Since the beginning. There will be talk, but really, nothing will come of it. Facebook can do what it wants, but as long as the draw ultimately is your friends and your family, you’ll keep coming back. And so will everyone else. There was a friend/coworker who made a big proclamation that he was leaving facebook. Taking a stand against their corporate greed, their shameless advertising, and their lack of privacy concerns. With his head held high, he closed his account and walked away from facebook sincerely expecting this procession of his friends and family to follow him. Not a single person left to my knowledge. He remained stoic and steadfast for months, attempting to seem uninterested at what he was missing on facebook when someone would tell him about an event or post. Eventually, quietly, he peeked back in, and literally stalked people, pretending he wasn’t involved. When confronted, he made it seem as if he taught facebook a lesson and made his point to everyone else. To this day, he makes a point of not posting or
“liking” a single thing – the most anti-social behavior I’ve ever seen on social media. NO, facebook will stay strong. And you’ll stay on it. You all will. No matter what they do.
It’s not necessarily current users who’ll stop using it, but rather the next generation who won’t feel the draw of it. My last post,
Look Over Your Shoulder Facebookfocused on the up and coming threats to Facebook. The platform might end up getting older with the user-base. What will they do then?Ralph, you have a point. To a point. If facebook, a very young company, keeps it fresh and installs new, as-yet-unimagined features, it may not bleed the youth. However, it is happening. I have a twelve-year-old, who isn’t even concerned with a future Facebook profile. She thinks it’s for old people. And we did, in fact, see what happened to MySpace. It never recovered. But it didn’t have a group-social feeling, and that was a problem. The “wall” changed everything for facebook. It interconnected people in a group, ready to comment and laugh at the same joke, or read of an important issue together, and in near real time. They actually thought about a “chat function” right on the wall under every post, but decided to make chat something as an add on, that one can have greater control of.
But here’s something many don’t often think of. Facebook is near-global. Many people from around the World join daily, and they don’t have the kind of “throw away” mentality us Americans have. They just want to communicate, especially with their loved ones in other parts of the World, see trends in cool places, look at movie trailers, near the newest songs from the West, and meet new friends around the World.
This is a huge draw for Facebook. Frankly, they don’t need all 300,000,000 Americans. There are billions of people out there. More getting internet access every day. And getting marketed to locally. Places in their neighborhood, city and country. Additionally, when the movie The Social Network came out, the end of the movie reads on screen that facebook has 700,000 people. Now, facebook has 1.5 billion. So, even if facebook fails some day in the future, it still didn’t fail. It is the single biggest social experiment the world has ever seen. And it has made Mr. Zuckerberg and others richer than almost everybody. It has joined family members, found lost loves, intrigued people who aren’t easily intrigued, created love stories, saved peoples lives. And all of this is no exaggeration. The stories are all there, ready to be googled.
So, if people stop using it. Choose not to go on it. After having all of that potential for them, I would be very surprised. I just don’t think it will happen.
p.s. – sorry, I never got an email that you had responded. Here I am 3-months later, and you probably forgot about the post.
If we could only have a reliable crystal ball! I think you’re right about people still using it, although it’ll be with a staler taste in the mouth I fear.