Facebook Adds Friction

If you’ve been led to this post via my Facebook profile, welcome. It wasn’t as easy as usual to get you here and I’ll explain why in a moment. The circumstances for that raise a good business question, though, and that’s what I want us to think about today.

I received an email from WordPress the other day. The screed is published on the WordPress platform, as are thousands of other sites. When I write a new post, it appears on my site as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Those are decent sources of traffic for me and even if readers don’t click through to the source I can impart my thoughts via those other platforms to a certain extent.

Back to the email. WordPress notified me that as of today, August 1, 2018, a change to Facebook’s API means that third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This includes Publicize, the tool that connects my site to major social media platforms like Facebook. Obviously, I can still do the posting to my own profile manually, as I’ve done today, but it’s certainly less convenient. Interestingly, they’ll still allow the tools to post to Facebook Pages, which tend to be used by businesses and groups. Of course, commercial entities such as pages have greatly reduced visibility in the News Feed unless you’re willing to pay to promote the post.

Why would Facebook do this? On the surface, it’s with good intention. They say it’s to prevent spam and nefarious actions on the site by making it harder to post across multiple profiles simultaneously. Some of the other changes they’re making that affect me less but some people a lot more are to protect user privacy. All laudable, right?

Maybe not. Here is what WordPress has to say:

While Facebook says it is introducing this change to improve their platform and prevent the misuse of personal profiles, we believe that eliminating cross-posting from WordPress is another step back in Facebook’s support of the open web, especially since it affects people’s ability to interact with their network (unless they’re willing to pay for visibility).

What if the moves are just to further insulate the Facebook platform from external content and/or actions? What if it actually is about solidifying their monopoly in the social media space? I won’t bore you with all of the API changes but some are pretty significant, including restricting a lot of the data pages get. Can you pay for it? I’ll willing to bet you can.

I guess my business question to you all is about where any of us draw the line in protecting our business. We’re living in a world in which reducing friction – the choke points within our daily lives where things stop flowing smoothly – is becoming expected. Facebook just added friction to adding content to their platform, a platform that would become almost useless without users doing exactly that. I’ve got trust issues with Facebook based on their behavior over the last decade with respect to everything from data privacy to their openness about what they’re doing. When traffic my stuff drops off, will I even bother posting there?

Do I think Facebook is going to go out of business without the screed generating engagement for them? No. Might they if it becomes too much trouble for anyone with engaging content to post on the site? Could be. I’ll guess we’ll all stay tuned right?