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All is fair in love and marketing. Including airing your grievances on your very public Facebook page.
That’s exactly what Web-based food delivery startup Eat24 did recently, bringing its beef with Facebook (so to speak) out in the open in a scathing blog post.
The problem? Eat24 is upset that the posts it makes to its Page aren’t getting the same reach with Facebook users that they did in the past.
“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,” Eat24 said, in a mock “Dear John” letter format. “But now? Now you want us to give you money if we want to talk to our friends.”
The crux of the problem lies in a number of changes Facebook is making to its News Feed algorithms, according to recent reports, that when implemented will drastically reduce the number of people who will see a marketer’s posts.
Instead, it’s a way to shift marketers over to actually forking over cash to Facebook by paying to promote their posts to their thousands — or in some cases millions — of followers.
“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,” Eat24 wrote. “That’s hella messed up.”
It’s a cute way of making a point, yet a serious issue for marketers on the platform. After brands have spent years amassing “Likes” and followers, Facebook has essentially rendered all that work and fanbase building useless, unless they decide to fork over cash. Eat24 may have made one less friend in Facebook, but the startup has a valid argument.
Alas, Facebook wasn’t having it. Brandon McCormick, one of Facebook’s public relations employees, delivered just as much sass in a public comment posted to Eat24’s Facebook page.
“The world is so much more complicated than when we first met — it has changed,” McCormick wrote. “There is some serious stuff happening in the world and one of my best friends just had a baby and another one just took the best photo of his homemade cupcakes and what we have come to realize is people care about those things more than sushi porn (but if we are in the mood for it, we know where to find it Eat24!).”
“So we are sorry that we have to part this way because we think we could still be friends — really we do,” McCormick wrote. “But we totally respect you if you need some space.”
Ouch. A funny retort, yes — but perhaps it’s not so funny for the rest of the brands out there grousing over Facebook’s new Pages strategy.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
