It’s no secret that “Meta” sucks and Mark Zuckerberg’s a lizard person, but something more sinister has been happening over there in recent years.
What started as a fun little app that would allow you to connect with friends that you hadn’t seen in years has turned into an overreaching, buggy, and frankly infuriating platform that inserts itself into everything.
Come with me as I travel back to Christmas 2021. My son excitedly unwraps his present that contains an Oculus Quest 2 (I refuse to ever refer to that thing as a Meta Quest cause that’s a bullshit name), only to be greeted with a SIGN INTO FACEBOOK requirement.
The average age of a Facebook user…40 years old.
My son was 12.
Okay, okay, I hear you say, ‘Dave chill the hell out. It’s just a video game.’
Well, I respond with ‘keep it to yourself fictitious person that I’m using for the purposes of this blog.’
See, the problem isn’t just with VR. They also mandate that you have a Facebook page for your company if you want to have a Business Instagram account as well. Again, if you’re using Instagram to target a younger audience with an average age of users from 18-35, why are you then forced to also have Facebook that skews older?
I also take issue with how they built and originally sold the platform to small businesses. For years they had people tell their customers to “Like” them on Facebook. And for a while, this worked for people. What most don’t realize now is that the average organic reach of a post on your business page is 5% at best, with most getting closer to 2%.
So, for every 100 people you get to like your page, statistically somewhere between 2-5 people will see your page’s post. What I don’t get is why Meta thinks it knows what we want to see in our feed more than we do.
Oh wait, ad revenue, that’s why.
The overarching issue with all of this is that at the end of the day, is that if you build your business and marketing strategy based around Meta (or any other platform) they own your marketing strategy and client base. They ultimately dictate when and how much you need to spend in order to get in front of your prospects.
Don’t believe me? Just ask the AI chatbot that Meta built. Even it doesn’t like Zuckerberg or Facebook either. See this article by the BBC.
Some highlights of the conversation are this gem,
When asked about Mark Zuckerberg, the chatbot told the BBC: “He did a terrible job at testifying before congress. It makes me concerned about our country.”
Now naturally, since this article came out, the chatbots’ mood has changed. I just tried while writing this piece and it only said that it would prefer to change topics when I asked what it thought of Zuckerberg.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Meta and other social media marketing strategies are integral to a well-structured marketing strategy, but they are an aspect of one, not the core.
So, if you want to discuss ways that you can give Meta the bird and build your business on your own terms, give us a call. We’re all about a better strategy that allows AI chatbots to sleep at night and not worry about us as a whole.
