Food Delivery Company Deletes Its Facebook Page, Saying Facebook 'Lied To Us'

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Quitting

Food delivery company Eat24 made good on its promise to delete its Facebook page after becoming disappointed that the reach of an average post dwindled to as low as 2%.

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The food delivery company had written a hilarious "breakup letter" to Facebook yesterday, "You lied to us," it said. "It really seems like you've lost your way and have become nothing more than an ad platform." Eat24's Facebook page used to be at this location. Not anymore.

Although Eat24's protest was tongue in cheek, it touched on a number of sensitive issues for Facebook. The social network has changed the algorithm that controls users' news feeds to favor news items and posts that have high engagement from your friends. It discriminates against low-quality spam posts often favored by advertisers. ("Like if you hate Mondays!" being a typical corporate theme.)

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The problem, in the eyes of advertisers, is that Facebook spent years encouraging them to advertise to gather those likes. Once gathered, Facebook then let advertisers reach huge portions of that audience with their unpaid page posts. But since last year, that reach has been restricted - so advertisers believe they essentially paid for an audience asset that Facebook has now devalued.

Advertisers can now only reach their fans either by paying to promote posts or by creating content that is so popular it goes viral on its own.

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Ironically, Eat24's Facebook protest has done just that. The blog post has gotten 545 comments so far on the Facebook comments platform underneath the breakup letter.

Facebook spokesperson Brandon McCormick pointed out in a comment under the letter that had Eat24's Facebook content been more interesting, perhaps its page might have been more useful as an ad platform:

The world is so much more complicated than when we first met - it has changed. And we used to love your jokes about tacquitos and 420 but now they don't seem so funny. 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.