Facebook’s increasingly fraught relationship with small businesses just got more complicated thanks to celebrity user George Takei: The former Star Trek star will publish a book with a chapter taking on Facebook’s controversial handling of page posts, just in time for the holidays.
Takei, whose page has nearly 3 million followers on the social network, says in a Facebook post that his forthcoming book Oh Myyy will include an entire chapter devoted to Facebook’s filtering of page posts using an algorithm called EdgeRank and its parallel practice of charging page owners to reduce EdgeRank filtering. Takei made the announcement while replying to another Facebook user who wrote a jeremiad against the filtering. Takei has been outspoken about his frustration with the filtering, which essentially forces him to pay Facebook if he wants to reach all of his own fans.
“I am writing a chapter in my book Oh Myyy about Edgeranking and what I have done to try and achieve higher engagement,” Takei writes. “I am curious as to why interactivity rates on my page appear to fluctuate so much when I have done nothing different. I have not been pressured to use Promoted Pages [advertising], but I have had to take active steps to get fans to add my page to their ‘Interests’ so that it has a higher likelihood of appearing in their newsfeed.”
Takei’s book is slated for release sometime around Thanksgiving, keeping alive a controversial issue that just won’t die. Earlier this fall, the blog Dangerous Minds and the author Ryan Holiday both published rants accusing Facebook of aggressively filtering posts from Facebook pages in order to get owners of the pages to pony up for advertising to escape the filtering. Facebook told our sister site Ars Technica that, regardless of whether the author has paid for promotion, a post can be suppressed if readers fail to interact with the post or if they respond negatively.
This is a dicey but important issue for Facebook. Businesses — as well as groups like nonprofits and celebrities like Takei — join the social network by creating pages, and they speak to customers and fans by posting to those pages, which users may follow by clicking “like.” A typical page post is only shown to around 15 percent of the people who follow the page; Facebook filters it from the news feeds of the rest based, it says, on relevance. Paying to get around this blockade with so-called “promoted posts” is a key, entry-level form of Facebook advertising, used to rope mom-and-pop merchants into doing business with the social network.
Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Sometimes the system backfires: Many small businesses feel extorted by Facebook, particularly after the company recently made it easier to see when a post is filtered and to buy an ad. Publishers who see their Facebook fan base grow while reach remains stagnant can’t help but wonder if Facebook is simply trying to sell more ads. At the same time, as more businesses join Facebook, the social network has a duty to users to make sure promotional business spam doesn’t flood news feeds.
It’s a complex and wonky issue, one that Facebook might reasonably expect might fade away into confusing arguments involving talk of algorithms, analytics, reach, and viral lift. Except it’s not going to fade away with Sulu from Star Trek beaming his detailed analysis of the situation into people’s Kindles, iPhones and iPads this holiday season along with cute animal pictures. Lending celebrity cred to the topic Facebook filtering is certainly a boon to advocates of internet transparency, but, if Takei’s past frustration is anything to go buy, it will be no gift to Facebook.
Family Feud: Tense Thanksgiving for Facebook and George Takei
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Family Feud: Tense Thanksgiving for Facebook and George Takei
