Foodies and Facebook have seemed like a natural pair from the start, says Ronn Torossian – Author of PR Book For Immediate Release. One one hand, there’s the foodies. They’re people who love food. And it’s not just a superficial love. It’s not just the taste. A foodie loves everything about food. From the culture surrounding it, to
social media marketingthe nature of it’s ingredients, and of course the actual look and presentation of the item. Meanwhile, when Facebook burst onto the scene it talked a good talk about wanting to faceplate communication between friends. One group that wants to help people talk to each other, another group with a love of talking about something. Seems like a match made in heaven, doesn’t it?
Well, the foodies over at Eat24 certainly felt that way at one time. And they’ve made a rather apt analogy about entering, starry eyed, into a new relationship. But like most relationships, they feel it eventually went sour. And as such they wrote a wonderful breakup letter to Facebook to mark the fact that they were deleting their account. Where did it all go wrong?
Basically, Eat24 noticed that their interaction with Facebook was showing a lot of the signs of a classic over controlling relationship. Eat24 wanted to share things with friends, to do things, to just talk and interact. Facebook wanted to control that and limit just what was being said. Worse, it had a heavy bias against anything food related.
It all came down to the introduction of a new algorithm by Facebook. It tried to average out what it thought people wanted, rather than actually listen to what they wanted. The end result wound up being a big mess where a post about food to friends might well never be seen by them. Well, unless Eat24 or others were willing to shell out money for the privilege. And then, the post would be a bit too seen. Eat24 wanted to share their thoughts and opinions on food with people who could actually go out and experience it in their area. Instead, by paying it just ended up being shared with people all over the world. And as any foodie knows, there’s few things more frustrating than having a promise of great food dangled in front of you and then being told it’s not available in your area.
So, with a heavy heart Eat24 decided to call it quits with Facebook. With other, more conductive options out there like Twitter they concluded that Facebook had simply become a pointless chase after something that had been lost a very long time ago. Facebook had changed, and not for the better. As such, like with so many relationships that everyone has, Eat24 decided to break up with Facebook.
