11/8/11

Facebook: You've changed

Facebook used to be a great tool for comedians. Lately, not so much.

Event invites have lost their mojo. People don't respond anymore. (Are invites even still getting to people's inboxes?) A show that used to get dozens of "Yes, I will attend"s now gets just a handful.

Start a group, you say? One that we started for Hot Soup a while back now says, "This group is scheduled to be archived. Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format."

What to do? Facebook says, "We recommend that you create a Page and notify your group members about it." Did that. (Hot Soup at UCB-East, yeah!) But things changed on that recently too. Now you can't update fans of a page using Facebook Messages.

As of September 30th you'll no longer be able to send an update to fans using Facebook Messages. We want you to connect with your audience in the most effective ways possible, and updates that go to Facebook Messages may end up unseen in the "Other" folder.


So you're helping me connect by taking away my ability to send people messages!? That's like saying, "I want you to make friends so I'm forcing you to stay in the house."

Listen, I hate spam and all that too. But is there some reasonable way to promote a show on Facebook these days?

It also seems to be way harder to get traction on anything posted at Facebook these days. Videos, funny status messages, etc. For example: The first episode of our "Made With Love" cooking show, posted a few months ago, got dozens of comments and 30+ likes. The second episode, posted last week, got no comments and only seven likes. It feels like it didn't even get seen by most folks.

I know the feed that shows up for me, which used to be somewhat relevant, is filled with BS from people I don't care about.

To sum it up: Facebook, you don't bring me flowers anymore.

2 comments:

EmD said...

Facebook is pushing everyone toward paid advertising. That was likely the plan from go.

Cody Hess said...

When Facebook obliterated MySpace, it was partially because Facebook offered almost 100% signal compared to MySpace's growing noise problem. By now though, Facebook is almost entirely noise and the noisier it gets, the less useful it becomes.

I actually quit Facebook because the spam-factor was so great that I was missing important personal messages and angering some significant acquaintances; at the point when I left, I considered Facebook not only unhelpful, but detrimental, to my ability to communicate.

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