At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless I do think that it is better than having an e-mail.

There are several reasons for that:

- First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service.

- People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook, they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc.

- The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed gets pretty close to that.

- People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail if they can have everything in their feed?

- If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you - administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of this on somebody else)

- I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing lists and also requires less tools.

- Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are, the more you can reach.

- Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are quite cheap.

- I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail.

Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github (issue tracker, code reviews).

Facebook likes have become almost useless to us. We have 61,000+ likes on one page and we're lucky if we "reach" (show up somewhere down their timeline) 1/12 of them in a week or month. "Boosting" every post is prohibitively expensive. So for 55,000 or so people, we'll never be able to interact with them in any way.

So, not worth much anymore.

Only boost your few posts that are getting interest on their own. It saves a lot of money and you already know it's engaging content.

If you're not getting any interest in any posts at all, maybe your content is just not interesting. Facebook always shows some of your posts to some of your followers.

"At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished"

Have you looked at a stock chart of Facebook recently? All time high basically and worth $220b.

Or did you mean the value the company brings to the user?

Value for the user. One Facebook "like" has various estimations of a price and some of them were quite hight (even going to thousands of dollars). A quickly found link from 2013 resumes some estimates: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-a-facebook-like-actua...

You misread what was said I think. It's about a facebook like, not about facebook itself.

Ah my bad - need more coffee.

People are much less likely to enter in their email address and join a mailing list about dishsoap, than they are to click a "like" button next to an advertisement for dishsoap.

That you can pay Facebook to reach those people again has value, that's why people do it.

Huh. I do the opposite. I might sign up for direct emails about dishsoap, but I'd be too embarrassed to let facebook spam all my friends that I like melonball cotton candy dishsoap, so I'll NEVER publicly "like" it. I'm really meticulous about only liking things that I don't mind if people know I support the company/product. So, basically I like my coffeehouse and my dive bar and that's about it.

Note: Facebook is quite inconspicuous about displaying fanpage likes; i.e. your friends will probably miss the information that you've liked some fanpage. Each of your friends most likely has hundreds of books, movies and commercial venues liked (you can check that in their profile), and you probably haven't seen a single one of them popping up on your timeline.

Really? Interesting, because I get spammed pretty constantly that my friends "liked" Barkbox or whatever stupid MLM pyramid scheme is the current fad in my newsfeed pretty constantly. In fact, the Barkbox one shows up almost every few days. Is that just because Barkbox is advertising on facebook? I always thought if I liked anything it would reciprocatively show up in their newsfeeds.

You might find that those are actually sponsored advertisements in your feed. You might also notice it's often the same people who have liked it.

They didn't like it right then and there, it's just that an advert is showing and FB pulls up people you can relate to as others who recommend it.

Damn, I think you're right. I guess because I am always posting pictures of my dog facebook really thinks I want to get him Barkbox! Fortunately I know Barkbox is overpriced junk. I don't know why I keep getting targeted for MLM schemes other than a bunch of my idiot frat buddies quit their jobs to sell MLM junk a few years ago and keep trying to get me roped into their "downlines."

Oh it's not a pyramid scheme though. Think of it as more of a circle. A circle of unity.

And in the middle of the circle of unity is us, the early adopters.

All we have to do is give Xenu all of our material belongings and buckle in for the incredible rewards coming our way!

It depends on number of friends and your general feed load. What I've noticed is that articles you've liked tend to show more often on others' feeds than fanpages you liked. Also, the latter used to be a smaller notification. I think recently it's more visible because they started to show summaries of selected posts under the fanpage name.

They do both, but Facebook version is more appealing with the added drama to it because of comments. People, especially those with narcissistic tendencies are attracted to drama. FB (and other social networks) evolved this to new extremes.

People spend way more time in Facebook than email, and (paradoxically) it's way easier to get them to like a Facebook page than to enter their email address in a form and hit submit.

So yes, email is great, but marketing is multi-channel or pointless. Facebook is the single biggest channel out there.

Yes, you have to invest some $$ in Facebook to get above the noise floor, but again: that's marketing. Email costs money too. Nothing comes for free.

> 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No.

First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself.

Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are.

> 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there.

Facebook is not trapping anyone inside. If you mean that you can't contact them out-of-band, then well, that's by design and actually a feature.

> If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business.

Most businesses come to the rational conclusion that this almost never happens, and the small risk is worth being where the customers are.

> 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page.

That is totally by design and again, very much a feature.

For some reasons businesses think they're entitled to "reaching out" to people with their unsolicited offers. They're not. We don't want your spam. Neither your, nor that of any of hundreds of companies we deal with every month. The etiquette here is the Hollywood principle - don't call us, we'll call you.

> 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people).

It's actually simpler than writing quality e-mails, or quality snailmails. There is some additional work because people will reach out to you more through Facebook than through conventional channels, and you need someone to handle the communication.

> - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors:

> 1. You are in control of your list.

Which is something we, the customers, don't want.

> 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.

And that we absolutely, positively don't want most of the time.

I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.

> First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself.

You start by saying that Facebook is not a competitor, but in taking over part of your core business--- keeping track of potential customers--- it could be seen as that.

> Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are.

Facebook's objective is total control of all communication and it will stubbornly refuse to allow the migration of its data off platform. It will fight tooth and nail to prevent any other competing alternatives for social communication (such as open ones like email) from being seen as viable. Frankly, that's a business risk for us all, because it moves control of communication into the hands of a third party. By coming down hard in support of them you are doing an important part of their marketing dirty work.

The net benefit for consumers is unclear. They may like it now but we are still in the honeymoon phase of this monopolistic process.

> I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.

Your support for them is so superlative that I have to ask: Do you have a stake in Facebook?

> You start by saying that Facebook is not a competitor, but in taking over part of your core business--- keeping track of potential customers--- it could be seen as that.

I never checked it out personally, but from what I heard, Facebook allows for integration with various third-party CRMs and stuff, so you still get to track potential and existing customers to your heart's content.

Your points are valid in a long-term view. Facebook monopolizing communication is not a good thing. But since when do most businesses care about that? It won't affect their bottom-line at all. It's a worry for consumers.

> Your support for them is so superlative that I have to ask: Do you have a stake in Facebook?

I have no stake in Facebook and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way. My support being "so superlative" is because as a user and customer, I hate business communication. Most of the stuff companies send is a waste of time for me, and I value my time. I'd like businesses to use Facebook more precisely because it makes spamming me harder. :). That, and since it's all engineered so that it is in company's interest to allow people to comment on their stuff, suddenly you can communicate with them under public view of other customers - so you won't be ignored so easily when you have a legitimate complaint.

> You start by saying that Facebook is not a competitor, but in taking over part of your core business--- keeping track of potential customers--- it could be seen as that.

If keeping track of lists of potential customers is such an integral part of your core business that someone else doing it is "competition", then it can be plausibly argued that you're in the spam business, at least to some degree.

> That is totally by design and again, very much a feature.

No, it wasnt like that when most of the Pages acquired the bulk of their followers, they could reach all their audience freely. It was a shitty idea solely to make money, it didn't "add value" to users. There were other, more meaningful ways to implement this, e.g. show Page posts on a separate tab, have limits of posts/day etc. Paying for views is a bad strategy to improve quality; imagine if HN worked like that.

Facebook did not just give every "fan" page an equal-sized traffic haircut. They started limiting page content in accordance with how much organic (non-paid) engagement it gets.

So for example Facebook pages like "Humans of New York" or "I Fucking Love Science" or "Amy Poehler's Smart Girls" still get popped into a lot of timelines despite (to my knowledge) not paying at all for boosting. Why? Because a lot of people love that content.

But if some other Facebook page saw a huge drop-off that stayed dropped off, then maybe that content is just not as interesting as other pages (like the ones above for example).

And in fact this is why Facebook made changes to page content visibility in the first place. Most pages posted boring obvious ads instead of interesting content.

Pages can still pay for higher visibility, but those are ads. Just like people can pay to "get into the New York Times"--via ads, not articles. And just like the NY Times, there is only a fixed amount of ad inventory at Facebook. Even when pages are paying, Facebook limits their audience, in order to keep the audience happy. No one wants to see a newsfeed full of 100% ads. Or even 50% ads. Or 25%.

You can still reach some of your audience freely. You can argue that Facebook is rent-seeking, but consider the problem that it solves: if every fanpage could reach all their audience for free, every user's timeline would turn into a product catalog.

Just go and count how many things you've liked so far. I have 821 "items" liked, most of them fanpages. If every one of them would be able to reach me with all their posts, I'd quit Facebook on the spot. The users are not there for the fanpages. That's why Facebook won't let companies hit everyone. Now whether or not they should allow people to pay for wider reach, that's questionable, but then again - it at least makes people prioritize. If you have a limited marketing budget, you will tend to pay for and thus prioritize more important communication.

I am not using facebook anymore, but i had a page that had organically grew its audience and brought a lot of traffic to facebook. I agree that pushing updates every day would clog users' timeline, but there are better ways to fix that. The fact that they chose to take your followers and basically resell them back to you is so dumb that i never bothered to pay up. Shows lack of vision on their part.

I guess they could've simply tied the post range to the inverse of posting frequency - i.e. if you post once a month, you reach everyone, if you post daily, you'll reach some random subset, etc.

But then again, Facebook has to get the money for their servers from somewhere (or at least enough of it to attract more investors). They could've chosen worse monetization strategies.