Facebook is Learning Business the Hard Way

Here’s a quick online business 101. When you have a free website which provides an incredibly popular service and which may, at any time be successfully imitated by a competitor, you need to work hard at creating user loyalty. The unwillingness of your site users to change websites is the only protection you have against membership erosion which may take down your business model.

Ok, I guess when the lesson was being given Facebook management were out to lunch. How else to explain the totally cavalier attitude towards user concerns regarding Facebook Pages being taken down without warning?

Facebook has been in hot water before concerning the blocking of profiles and the restriction of its services to those who somehow managed to fall foul of its automated and very imprecise algorithms guarding against spam. In a few instances the party in question happened to be a journalist who had a platform to shout from and Facebook responded and in a few cases even backtracked.

The majority of users however are simply sent the Facebook script regarding ‘infringement and/or violation of Facebook regulations” signed by ‘The Facebook Team’, a moniker which is as infuriating as it is indicative about the facelessness of the organisation and its unwillingness to be held accountable for flawed processes regarding the reporting of pages and profiles.

Individuals who are banned usually just come back using a different email address and begin the laborious process of contacting their friends (a handful at a time lest they be accused of spamming) and letting them know that they are back on Facebook with a slightly different profile, this time and can they connect up again?

The process is time consuming and annoying for those receiving the messages (I know I get anywhere between one and six of these every month and I have barely got 500 friends) but when you have a Facebook Page set up which is part of your business it can be catastrophic. Companies rely on their Facebook Pages for much of their online social marketing strategy. They invest heavily in terms of time and effort and manpower to run them properly and when they get taken down without even a chance to respond or (apparently) even the semblance of an investigation by ‘The Facebook Team’ then it can spell disaster for a business.

Facebook is now in the cross-hairs for many issues regarding privacy, email notifications (a glitch in its programming earlier in the month overrode user settings and annoyed thousands of its users) and, now, for the process (or lack of) which it has in place to deal with reports of profiles or Facebook Pages which ‘break’ the rules.

In terms of where it is in the marketplace Facebook is just coming out of puberty. Its plans to roll out a number of products including credits and business places depend upon its ability to keep its membership base happy and generate a sense of trust in its management of things. Right now this is not happening. Facebook may have just a small window while it has no serious competition to get things right. Should it fail to act fast and with decisiveness this will become the moment it drove the first nail in its coffin.