Every day that goes by I am more convinced that the Twitter stream is the best way to communicate, as a brand and as a consumer. On Twitter, as in Facebook, I follow/like whatever brands I find interesting, engaging and resonate with my believes/interests. If I see that a brand does/say something I don't like, I simply unfollow/unlike.
What Facebook is doing is (over)engineering how my relationship with brands/people are, and I don't like that. If I like Robert Scoble on Facebook it is because I want to see what he has to say, and my like should not just be another stat on on Scoble's total number of followers. Hence, my use of Twitter is significantly higher than that on FB. Facebook is digging itself into a big hole.
>Every day that goes by I am more convinced that the Twitter stream is the best way to communicate, as a brand and as a consumer
As an avid Twitter consumer without a Facebook account, I agree with you...for now.
But until Twitter actually makes enough money to support itself, let's not get too far ahead with the "they're doing it right!" argument. I see no way that they don't eventually end up in the same boat as Facebook, forcing promoters to compete for limited space.
You follow a band you like because you want to know about their upcoming performances and new music. You follow an artist you like to see new stuff they're working on and when they post it online. You follow your favorite family owned restaurant to see what specials they have and when they're doing a wine tasting. You follow your favorite local bar to find out when trivia night is.
There are a ton of reasons to follow things that aren't friends. And Facebook was a great way to track all that stuff. Now, it isn't, because Facebook changed the algorithm. You can still find it if you manually click on the Pages Feed, which is handy for folks who know it's there. But most people don't, so most of what you take the time to post on Facebook as a business is barely seen by anyone.
To be fair, half the time people sign up for purely symbolic reasons, or to participate in a "like us on Facebook to win.." competition and not necessarily because they want daily ads for $brand served to them in between their friends' baby pics and obscure links posted by some guy they once met at an airport.
If you really want regular updates from a vendor you sign up to their mailing list...
But the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for updates you actually want to receive, because there's always been a huge volume of content with imperfect filters in place; if you really want to check on a brand you either go direct to their Facebook page which is entirely unaffected by filter algorithms or follow them on Twitter or by email. Users who only ever saw a fraction of the brand communications in their main feed anyway aren't particularly upset by changes in the filter that mean they see an even smaller percentage (if they get more friend updates instead they might even see it as a net win). Brands whose free advertising reaches 1-2% of eyeballs rather than 10-20% of the ones upset here, as with the Gmail "promotions" tab.
Eat24's marketing team aren't stupid: they know this which is why you don't get coupon offers on Facebook, you get meme graphics, jokes about food and pictures of pizza. You get coupon offers by email without the jokes or on Twitter with them.
Edit: disagreement by downvoting is particularly lame when it comes without an explanation of why I'm supposedly wrong. You don't see everything that every person or brand has posted in your newsfeed, haven't done for a long time, and in practice wouldn't do without a lot of scrolling even if they didn't filter at all. Whether Facebook's intent in filtering Pages posts to your feed more aggressively than Friend posts to your feed is purely commercial, purely driven by user engagement metrics or something in between, it's hardly a new development or something that only applies to brands.
> "the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for updates you actually want to receive"
Yes it was. It was great for me for several years. I blocked games and kept my friends list to actual friends, and I was easily able to keep up with peoples' lives AND with products/companies I followed.
Eventually they changed the algorithm enough times, and hid/removed enough options, that I couldn't keep up. I posted a mini-rant in the comments here about it -- how FB's algorithm decided it was more important that I see a random not-very-close high school friend post an offensive political meme than that I see my brother's wedding pictures.
The only things I follow on Facebook are things I actually want to see on Facebook: 2 friend's bands, a watchmaker I like, a casting agency to let a couple friends know when something fits for them, etc. I don't have any 'like us to win' or symbolic/guilt likes.
It depends on the brand and the type of engagement on offer, obviously. If a band I like announces a tour, or an arts organization I like announces a new program of performances, or a software product I use daily announces a new feature or release, I'm interested to get an e-mail (in low volumes and strictly opt-in of course).
Customer service actually works on twitter. It seems weird, but it's a thing. Aside from that, "brand" isn't just some faceless megacorp, there are lots of other brands, including creators of all sorts like musicians, web comics, craft beer makers, and so on.
why? because I want to hear what they have to say, and by "engage" I don't mean to reply/contact them, but simply consumer their content with the occasional ping:
i. News, I want to stay up to date: I like to follow Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, Pando, Recode
ii. General interest: The Economist, National Geographic, Science Magazine, various Universities
iii. Companies I use their products/services or find interesting and what to get their updates: IBM, Dropbox, Disney, TED, Formula 1 teams, Raspberry Pi, a bunch of airlines, hotel chains, etc
Aside from the reasons everyone else listed, I've used it customer support too. I've reached out to bands to ask last minute questions about their shows and actually have a better response rate with getting in touch with AT&T over Twitter than via email or sometimes phone.
Twitter could really use extra (optional) tools for managing different relationships, but I definitely agree that trying to algorithmically filter what I see is ultimately the wrong way to go with anything that resembles current social networks.
Keep it simple, and use your clever algorithms to present me with concrete choices, rather than simply enforcing them with no input.
If you bookmark https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr for your starter page, the News Feed will go into "Recent Stories" mode, featuring everybody in reverse chronological order, equivalent of Twitter's feed.
Well that's funny brands are complaining Facebook is selling out. That's like Coca-Cola complaining that the Super Bowl is too commercial. When I joined The Facebook it was for me and my college classmates. There was no such thing as liking a brand (and maybe not even liking at all). I remember most of my friends being surprised when after liking a brand you were inundated with spam. I guess after people obsessively liked things for years, and added every possible friend, the only thing left is to pay for news feed placement.
I have a question on this. Let's say small college puts a post on Facebook like an event, financial aid warning, or a school close announcement. If I read this right, then that post will not be distributed to everyone following the college? In contrast, on Twitter, a post will go to all followers. Is this right?
The Facebook part is right. The Twitter part really depends on what "go to" means. They may not scroll back far enough to see your last post, and thus may not see the post at all, but I believe it's shown in the feed of 100% of your followers. I'd be interested to know otherwise. My own reach through Twitter is about half as good as it is on FB, and I have followers who seem way more interested in what I do than my FB fans. On FB, I seem to have way more success posting things personally than I do on my business page.
Edit: I post my stuff to Google+ too, especially groups that seem like there's some interest in the subject of my post. I'm happy enough with the results (from my analytics) that I'll keep doing it.
Well you can pay to promote a post so it will have a higher reach. Businesses should be more appreciative of the fact that 5-10% reach for free is far more free reach than you will get with TV, radio, Google ads, or anything else short of putting flyers on telephone poles.
Well, no. I disagree with what you're saying. If I create a page for my business and share coupons and stuff, people are free to come like my page. That means they want to see more of my stuff voluntarily.
Why is Facebook extorting money from the business to allow users to see what they want to see?
It's not "extortion" - Facebook is under no obligation to provide businesses with 100% reach (or indeed any reach) for free. Facebook is not a non-profit or some government service - they are a business. And just like you want to make money for your business, they want to make money for theirs. [And if they don't make money they go out of business and that certainly won't increase your reach]
IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses - if the only option was pay for reach nobody would be complaining. Because there has always been some amount of free reach there's an odd sense of entitlement.
IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses
It has always confused me that Facebook has done so little to monetize businesses, many of whom now list their Facebook pages in major advertising campaigns rather than their own website. Traditionally the service that Facebook provides to businesses was a pretty high value one, and it wasn't that the businesses brought users -- the businesses went to Facebook because the users were already there.
No, it does my mean they want to see a constant stream of every promotion and sale you offer. It means that they liked _one thing_ and your page is no different than the thousand other things I have liked last month. You don't have some entitlement to space on my feed. If I am interested then a constant stream of likes to your content will keep you in view. If you convinced me and ten thousand others to like a single cat picture that does not mean I want to see anything else you post. I may like your television advertisement, but that is not why I turn on the tv or select a particular channel.
The problem with Facebook's behavior is not that their changes insulate you from spam so much that they may encourage it: the new equilibrium for spammers being not to publish less so much as to ramp up publication and reach the same number of people through volume. Meanwhile, smaller publishers who create limited volumes of good content are less likely to bother at all.
No, you are the one who is confused here. A like for a page, similar to a like on a single post, is not permission to spam my news feed. If I wanted to subscribe to your updates I would actually, you know, subscribe. A like is a coarse-granularity indication that I have some interest in your page, but just like everything else I opted to "like" it is one indicator among many that should be used to build my feed.
Because your page is one of the 400 pages the user liked. Some of those pages are hyperactive as far as new content (New York Times, CNN, etc.) How would you prioritize the stories?
It's just apparently not something majority of their users need based on their usage patterns. If they switched to this as default, brands would complain as well, as a post appearing at 7 am is very unlikely to be scrolled down to by a user who checks Facebook at 8 pm their local time zone.
I have that bookmarked in the browser's toolbar instead of default, but you're right, ability to default is highly dependent on how you reach the facebook.com page.
You're not comparing apples to apples. That's 5-10% reach _of people who have opted in to seeing your updates_. The better comparison is that you have 100% reach to people who sign up for your newsletter.
Highly dependent on # of friends and # of other pages those recipients follow. A brand new user account following just the university page is 100% guaranteed to receive a posting from the university page, that probability goes down as number of friends or pages increases.
I've never heard of this brand before today. And thus I'd never seen this post before you posted it here. Now, my mission is to move to a city that is served by Eat24 and to give them my money. These guys are very smart - they had a problem (we need to increase ad revenue and ROI), they found an inventive solution (advertise on porn sites, the demographics add up and there's NO competition), and they executed a great plan by engaging with the sites and the porn stars themselves. Very smart indeed!
I don't know what the original author is talking about to be honest. When I use Facebook, my feed is filled with friends & family posts and the very occasional ad.
To really put it into perspective, I just opened my Facebook now, first ad is in position 5 in my feed. The next ad popped in at the 52nd item in my feed. I went looking for a third ad.. I decided to stop after the 200th item in my feed and I generally don't scroll down that far in a single sitting.
Sure, there are ads on the side, but I'm more or less blind to those ads because they're always there.
That's not to say it was always like this. Candy Crush ads and whatnot used to pop up all the time from certain people. That's why you can hide those. They quickly disappear.
I guess it must just be cool to dump on Facebook now.
We must be in different buckets. I signing and I see 1 message from a friend followed by 1 ad, 2 sponsored posts and to the right 4 or 5 ad's in the sidebar.
Honestly I still don't get the hubbub over this algorithm change by Facebook. It's a scaling issue Facebook is attempting to solve, in a dramatically different (and IMHO superior) way than Twitter.
On both networks, every time you look at your feed you'll only look at the top X items. On Twitter, that'll just be the X most recent items. On Facebook, those X items are picked algorithmically based on the degree of engagement. The latter seems 1000x better and more intelligent than Twitter, even though it technically means not every post I'm subscribed to will make it into my feed.
As people spend more and more years on Facebook, we naturally accumulate more friends and pages (personally around 1200 friends and 200 pages). Thus, we're subscribed to more content. Far too much to reasonably make it into our feed. Given that X is fixed, the percentage of any particular source's posts which will make it into X should decline. It seems totally reasonable that which posts make it in are dictated by how much engagement those posts had.
No. Just no. Like many other small businesses, I paid thousands of dollars to Facebook for ads to create fan pages. People who were interested in what I was doing became fans (I had about 4000 in all). There was never any indication from Facebook that they would make it increasingly difficult to reach those people, and those fans were never told that they would not see my posts. Due to changes in their algorithm I watched the views for my posts drop from 1200 to less than 10. Then I was told I had to pay to reach my own fans. Businesses like ours helped grow Facebook by building fan pages but Facebook betrayed us and, more importantly, betrayed our fans. It's sick.
The fact that I liked your page last year does not mean that I stil want a constant stream of your store updates and coupons. The amount of stuff that can be put onto my Facebook news feed is finite, and the number of people who think they have some entitlement to that space because of a single action they convinced me to take in the distant past is constantly growing. You didn't do anything to grow Facebook other than try to use it as a cheap advertising channel and I would rather Facebook try to figure out wha I need/want than to have my news feed cluttered by everyone whose page I ever liked.
So many things wrong with this post. Firstly, the system before was fine: For four years people voluntarily chose to engage with my fan page and receive posts from my business. If fans didn't like my posts they could block them or leave the page. Facebook never said at any time they would throttle fans' access to my content, so yes, it was a cheap advertising channel. That's why we used Facebook instead of some other social network.
If you are happy to let your newsfeed be determined not by what you want but by who pays the most then good luck to you. It's bad for the fans and bad for us, and ultimately -- as you can see by the increasing number of anti-Facebook posts -- it's bad for Facebook.
Instead of resorting to emotion, can you explain a compelling alternative for how Facebook could actually solve this?
Yes, you have 4000 fans. But I'm 99% sure you're not the only page they like. They probably like many other pages, and also have many other friends (2 numbers that increase over time). Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?
This is purely a problem of scale. Most of my friends don't see my updates, because they also have many other friends. But my mom sees every single update I have because I'm her only Facebook friend.
Perhaps it's annoying/confusing that Facebook gave you the option to monetarily combat the effects of a growing network. But organic growth also still works.
Facebook started to throttle response just over a year ago, well after most people already had all of their friends in their feed, and well after most people had joined most of the pages they like.
It's no coincidence that Facebook told me I could get more views by spending money to reach the same people I had been reaching organically just a few weeks before.
The solution is to stop trying to extort money from the businesses that helped them build their business and let the users decide what they want to see.
You're acting as though Facebook has somehow blocked fans from visiting your page. They're of course free to do so.
Given that you accept it's a statistical impossibility for all content I'm subscribed to to reach my feed, what we're debating is priorities. Before this algorithm change, I fully believe it was tilted too far in terms of brands—I received way too many updates from brands and few from my friends.
What you call extortion is what every sane person in the world calls advertising. If a magazine writes a story about my business (free advertising), that obviously doesn't entitle me to free advertising in all future issues. Neither does Facebook once giving you free reach.
If your feed before was "tilted too fat in terms of brands" then you could easily have hidden them from the feed or unsubscribed.
Your analogy is wrong. Facebook did not write a free story about my business. I paid them to help me gather a group of people who were interested in my business. They never at any point said that I would have to pay to access those users. Then, after I spent a lot of money, time and effort maintaining that group, they told me that I couldn't access them without paying them again and again. That's extortion, not advertising.
As someone who has ran a business that has sold many millions of dollars of advertising you don't screw over your readers and advertisers to make an extra buck. It might work in the short term, but it's a failing business strategy.
> Facebook started to throttle response just over a year ago, well after most people already had all of their friends in their feed, and well after most people had joined most of the pages they like.
That's a naive explanation. Is there a day when everybody is supposed to be done with liking pages and vow never to like a page again? Was there a worldwide memo on this?
New quality pages appear all the time - IOC is creating a brand new page for each Olympics, large fashion brands create pages for distinct lines they launch, media promote their journalists' and topic pages in addition to main media pages.
>Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?
And requiring people to pay to reach fans somehow magically fixes this? Does the payment requirement somehow supercede the best algorithms in perfectly balancing post activity? And, do brands with deeper pockets somehow automatically have the most compelling content?
Do you sincerely believe that this is all about solving that problem and it just happens to have a very positive impact on Facebook's bottom line?
>But organic growth also still works.
This statement is obviously and mathematically less true than it once was. Reaching one fan organically does not mean organic "works". Degree matters here and a much smaller percentage of posts organically reach fans than at a previous time. Somewhere between zero and 100, the degree of organic efficacy becomes a non-starter for companies who previously answered Facebook's call to engage with fans for free, and are now required to pay an untenable amount to reach them.
> Does the payment requirement somehow supercede the best algorithms in perfectly balancing post activity?
Yes. That's precisely the point. As a business, you can accept whatever the algorithm dictates or you can pay to override the algorithm (ie. advertising). No different than the tradeoff between hoping a magazine writes an article about you vs. guaranteed reach by purchasing an ad.
> This statement is obviously and mathematically less true than it once was.
I don't dispute this. It's the natural result of a growing network while people's attention stays finite.
>That's precisely the point. As a business, you can accept whatever the algorithm dictates or you can pay to override the algorithm (ie. advertising).
You're moving the goalposts. The original problem was supposedly one of filtering noise from the consumer end. Now, you're talking about advertiser options for reaching their audiences. Yes, we know they now have a choice to pay or not. That's exactly the point.
To see the difference, consider if one advertiser with a massive budget could afford to pump out, say, 100 messages a day. Is the user now having a better experience?
So, agaim, how does forcing advertisers to pay suddenly balance the posts people see?
Here's my hit prediction - in 1-2 years HN will be full of blog posts of people bemoaning how they are forced to abandon Twitter, not because they have just noticed that 140char is too short to convey a meaningful message, but because they feel that they've been betrayed and/or misled.
(It will take longer because they charge substantially less, but it will happen because they charge substantially less.)
This is why Facebook is buying other companies because people are migrating away from Facebook.
One flaw Facebook has, when everyone's been on it for years they collect hundreds of friends from random old parts of their life. This waters down the experience because random people you barely know posting all the time turns your feed into something less interesting.
Toss in more ads combined with old acquaintances, and distant family members and you have a spammy feed.
Plus advertisers are mad because they invested in broadening their reach only to have it taken away from them unless they pay to promote.
A new social network is a fresh social network, void of your parent's family friends and clothing companies you no longer care about.
Facebook is myspace all over again.
The most telling decline stat, my older sister who is a soccer mom and was obsessed with Facebook for years recently told me, "we don't really go on Facebook anymore, we use instagram."
uh-oh, it's the non-technical family member indicator. She was the last one of us to get a smartphone too.
That's why Facebook is buying other internet properties. Because their's is on the decline with actual engaged users, their stats might show new users joining quickly, those are probably bots, spammers, and foreigners. Facebook's future is a universal login tool and a place to see you're great aunt's inspiration quote spam.
You realize that at the same time as the occulus rift purchase they announced one billion mobile users, right? No one is moving away from facebook. Everyone has anecdotes but the financial filings have real numbers. They may not be growing at the rates they were in the past, but that was inevitable.
I actually kind of feel for facebook. Not even a year ago people were complaining about Facebook not having enough relevant content etc. So they were migrating away. Old facebook was filled with commercial spam and made it a crappy experience. EdgeRank helped with that aspect a lot.
Switching hats, this also bothers me though. I'm a marketer for a lot of local businesses through my agency, and obviously this sucks. It's still a really valuable platform from a paid perspective. In fact using the some images and copy on facebook versus Reddit I get almost 5x the CTR and conversions. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're savvy and you're willing to treat Facebook like any other ad network there's still a lot of value to be had. The days of free engagement from pages seems to be coming to an end. That really sucks for people who paid to build their's up. Going back on features like that and screwing people etc. seems to be an endemic of the tech industry as a whole though and not just Facebook. Google Reader anyone?
I know this is more of a rant and points out more problems than solutions, but I just wanted to point out the situation is more complex than Facebook is bad let's hate them.
Okay then not google reader. What about the myriad of startups that "pivot" leaving paying customers hanging etc. Frankly too, that was a very small part of my overall point.
My sincere apologies for the sarcasm, but you mean to tell me that your previously free source of massive one click fan reach is no longer free?! There is no possible way that this was intentional ...
The algorithm they describe is apparently called "EdgeRank." All I can find via Google are really bad infographics and worse layman explanations (ones that make it clear the writer doesn't understand basic graph theory, or is adulterating their understanding for whatever reason).
Can anyone post a link to a research-level paper explaining the algorithm? The name EdgeRank makes me think it's a ripoff of PageRank, so are they solving some sort of eigensystem for, what, an incidence matrix instead of an adjacency matrix?
Ah. It appears to be nothing more complicated than computing this linear formula given, and Facebook has a thousand tiny little knobs for adjusting the parameters.
Maybe the problem is that their algorithm is not really an algorithm. PageRank was good because it had an interpretation as a random walk that made sense (before SEO). EdgeRank can only be interpreted as an arbitrary formula.
Sounds like they're cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Why not just go with the 100% free route and accept less engagement on their posts? They will still profit. People will still come to Facebook and search for them.
I'm no fan of Facebook either, but this just seems childish. In the end, it's not Facebook who's hurt. It's them and their FB-only fans.
Because engagement with the people who like your page is purposely being dropped to 1-2%. So, those 10,000 likes you have won't really matter because only 100 or 200 people will see it. Unless you pay $20 to get all 10,000 to see it and get you another couple dozen likes.
You're right, but you didn't point out the other obvious thing that some people aren't getting: it takes effort to properly post things on Facebook. Add that to only 1-2% of your hard-won subscribers are actually seeing it and it makes it really not worth it.
Has anyone really looked at their Facebook page? Their engagement is low for a good reason - they simply aren't good at posting on Facebook.
Go look at their page and tell me: if you were in charge of Facebook's algorithm, would you put that stuff on every person's feed without charging a bunch of money???
I'm by no means an expert, but I know that their posts aren't exactly making me interested in ordering food or talking to them.
They do, however, have some posts that went viral, but they're really not suited towards their customer base.
It's just not a good feed. IMHO, and obviously also in Facebook's, they don't "deserve" any more attention when there are tons of more successful alternatives for Facebook to show.
It doesn't matter the page. Facebook itself is purposely turning the algorithm down to weight page posts much less strongly than they weight individual posts. It's Facebook that's pushing it down to 1-2% and has been dialing it back consistently for the last 4 months or so. That 1-2% metric isn't based on people upset about their unpopular pages, it's from inside Facebook itself.
While I agree with the problem with paid ads and bots, it is funny that the blog uses like buttons and has facebook comments though they are leaving facebook.
I just don't understand why a company would want a Facebook page; consequently all this angst and drama leaves me befuddled. They have a website. They can show people who care pictures of food and whatever else they want. Why would they seek to dilute their web presence and message by helping another company profit from their content?
Because if people "like" their page on facebook, company updates will show up in those people news feed. People are likely to check their facebook feeds and unlikely to check your company website.
Whether the company wants to build community, let customers know something (plumbing broken we are closed today) or simply show ads, facebook is a way to push it on customers. Website is not.
Most companies do not worry about "diluting" their web presence, they want to be shown as much as possible on as much as possible places.
Because Facebook is visited on a daily basis by people who are your customers, and they provide a free method of delivering advertising to those customers (albeit a significantly smaller subset of their customers these days). I guarantee you that Eat24 has made several orders of magnitude more money from running Facebook campaigns than Facebook has made from ads served alongside Eat24 content.
I mostly agree with you. That said, FB can be used to drive traffic to their site. A little off topic, but: I am just an individual consultant and I write some books. I find FB and G+ to be effective for letting people know when I have a new blog article, open source project, or new book available.
But you are absolutely correct: we should own and develop our own web properties.
Facebook is like any other marketing channel: it can drive a great deal of sales and brand awareness, if you know how to manage the channel well.
Facebook is taxing their channel more in order to capture more of this value for themselves, but there's still value left over for companies to generate and capture for themselves.
I 100% support eat24 in their decision. Facebook is ridiculous now. I requested my "facebook archive" 2 days ago and still have not received my email confirmation with the download link. As soon as I do, I'm deleting my facebook profile as well. Goodbye Facebook. I hoped you would learn from mistakes, but I see you haven't.
Silly post. Facebook is a business. Just like in Costco, you don't get free samples forever. At some point you need to buy the bagel bites to get full at home.
The point you are missing: this business considers itself to be a content creator and value adder, and they do that because Facebook has previously encouraged that. Now Facebook are saying that they don't care how compelling your content is, if you are commercial in any way, you have to pay. That's not how a social network is meant to work.
Who exactly defines "how a social network is meant to work?" Seeing as Facebook is one of the two most defining social networks of the social network era I think they at least have a say.
Who exactly defines "how a social network is meant to work?"
The users do. Facebook will see declining participation if they keep taking user-hostile actions like this. People need to feel they are in charge of their feed (at least mostly in charge), but if they no longer control who sees their content, or which content they see, and hence become unhappy using the service or use it less, that's going to be a big problem for FB.
There's a reason that Twitter and Google label things as sponsored ads. It's because when you are providing a service, there is a direct conflict of interest between your user experience and your ad sales. If you don't draw a line between advertising and organic content, then you severely risk degrading the content your user receives, and it doesn't matter whether you think you are or not (clearly Facebook thinks it can toe this line), but as soon as users perceive that the content they are receiving is more payola than popular then you've killed the golden goose.
Silly answer because if you read the post you realize that they did pay for advertisement, is just that not even that works because it just brings spammy/fake likes.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "<company> ads" and "<company>'s content". Facebook is a promotional platform. Content posted there by companies are advertisements, nearly by definition.
People like/follow accounts of companies on social networks in order to consume the content those accounts post. Certainly this includes marketing material, but a key distinction between this and ordinary ads is that people have made a deliberate decision, "I wish to see content from this company".
That content becomes part of the reason people spend time on the platform, adding more opportunities for Facebook to sell actual ads (including to competitors, I might add). The network effect applies to companies, too!
Facebook is now denying that content to users who have said they want it, and destroying most of the value to the companies of creating that content. This is a reversal of their prior policies (thus a bait-and-switch), dishonest (if they don't want companies participating in their social network, they should just ban them and make them run ordinary ads), and just plain ol' stupid (because they're deliberately damaging their network and their image).
I think, what you are saying is, "It's not an ad if somebody signed up to see it". It takes a lot of imagination to distinguish between "company content" and "ads" on a platform whose purpose is PR and promotion.
In your opinion, not in mine. If Facebook agrees with you, then Facebook should be honest and ban commercial entities from having accounts, instead requiring them to use only the ordinary advertising mechanisms.
Liking your ad/page does not mean I want a constant stream of your ads. Under what circumstances would you believe that just because I said that I liked something you posted once or twice you now have some claim on my attention in the future and under what circumstances would that claim end?
Facebook isn't "demanding money to carry Eat24 contents for free". It's suggesting that if they want to bombard large numbers of people with pictures of food to convince them to order takeaway, they probably shouldn't rely on the free feed delivery mechanisms to do so.
Let's not pretend Eat24 was doing Facebook a favour here, or that anyone signed up to Facebook to look at pictures of pizza. Facebook was doing Eat24 a favour, and Eat24 were earning so nicely from it they were willing to experiment with shelling out money to continue distributing the same content.
What Facebook is doing is (over)engineering how my relationship with brands/people are, and I don't like that. If I like Robert Scoble on Facebook it is because I want to see what he has to say, and my like should not just be another stat on on Scoble's total number of followers. Hence, my use of Twitter is significantly higher than that on FB. Facebook is digging itself into a big hole.