Dear Facebook – why are you being so difficult? (part 2)

I wrote a few weeks ago about how Facebook are making it incredibly difficult for companies to use their interface. Since I wrote that they’ve made a couple more changes that make it even more difficult.

No way to update your fans

First Facebook took away the ability to send the fans of your page a direct message. They left the functionality to send an update to your fans, but you only see this if you actually go into your updates and you don’t get an email notification either. Now they’ve taken that away as well, so there is no real way to contact your fans directly. Now, if someone’s become a fan of your page, then they’re interested in your brand and your content. I can’t see why Facebook would take away the option to message someone if they’ve clearly stated that they’re interested in your content. They seem to have changed rules for developers, to allow you to contact email addresses on an application but I wouldn’t imagine many people would opt to do this and it’s still not an option for small businesses that don’t have the resource to build their own application.

Can’t run a competition on your own page

Facebook recently changed their guidelines on promotions and sweepstakes, making it harder for people to run their own competition. In short, in order to run a competition you have to do this through an application as a tab on a page. You might be able to use an existing app, but if you want a quality app that’s branded then you’re going to have to pay a developer for this. Not something many smaller businesses will be able to afford. Subsequently, if you want to promote your competition in any way, you need written permission from Facebook 7 days prior to running your competition. And good luck getting to a contact at Facebook in order to get this – you’ll need to spend about $10,000 per month on advertising before you get that privilege.

What happened to the Facebook box?

It used to be the case that there was a simple link to add a fanbox to your site, which has now disappeared (before and after below)

That’s now gone and when you click on the link to ‘promote your page’ in the edit screen, that just takes you straight through to the Advertising link. I’ve no doubt there will be some dark corner within Facebook where you can access the box, or you can find a widget online but they’re certainly not making it easy for you. Shame, because all that’s doing is ultimately driving more people back to their site.

Facebook are clearly courting the advertisers here. The recent changes to their ad API, as well as promoting their own platform heavily within Facebook itself, demonstrate this (the ad below happened to pop up in my profile last night).
Incidentally, why they think it’s an advantage to a page owner that someone can become a fan in the ad itself rather than visiting your page is beyond me.

The shift is increasingly in favour of those with the advertising dollars, which is good for some, but unfortunately makes Facebook less of a social platform. And if anyone thinks that all it takes to become a viral hit on Facebook is a good idea, then you should read how much Farmville spent on advertising.