This week’s ABC Grandstand segment Sean asks the question that has been brewing in the digital world, has Facebook jumped the shark?  Listen in below.

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Pushing back

Over the past few months there has been growing frustration amongst Facebook fan page owners & fans alike.  Facebook Page owners have seen their Facebook reach drop dramatically over the past few months.

Here is some articles highlighting the frustrations:

• Facebook, your brands strategy is screwed - Mumbrella
• FACEBOOK: I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK - Dangerous Minds
• Dear Fans - Richard Cheeseman
• EdgeRank Impact Organic Brand Reach - iMediaConnection
• How Can Pages Respond To Facebook’s EdgeRank Changes? - AllFacebook
• Facebook Quietly Destroys Half the Value of Your Brand Page Overnight - Jeff Doak
• Facebook Algorithmic Change to Decrease Reach on Brand Page Posts - Social@Ogilvy

Even Dallas Mavericks owner and fellow Sports Geek Mark Cuban weighed into the debate just a few hours after our discussion with this tweet.

FB is blowing it ? This is the first step.. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new Myspace as primary site twitter.com/mcuban/status/…

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) October 27, 2012

Response from Facebook

Facebook has responded via their Facebook Studio blog with some key points.

• While we make changes to news feed occasionally, the fundamental way it works has not changed. We mentioned earlier that news feed works to serve up messages – organic and paid – that people are most likely to interact with.
• What this means for businesses is that monitoring what types of posts are getting good responses is key, and always has been.
•  Tools like promoted posts are simple ways to turn those important Page posts into ads.

Sports Geek’s 3 things to fix it

Here is 3 points must correct right now to reverse this trend.

Turn off Edgerank

By simply turning off Edgerank (the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what posts you see in your news feed) fans will see all posts and then will start curating their own feed by unliking pages producing poor content.

Pages who create great content will be rewarded with organic growth as fans will like, comment & share freely.  With Edgerank turned off Facebook page owners can focus on content and won’t have to beg for likes and comments to stay relevant with Edgerank algorithm.

Focus advertising on attracting new fans

With Edgerank turned off more people will see posts published by pages and marketing budgets can be directed to attracting new fans not just reaching the fans who have already liked your page.

Additionally Facebook should make is very clear to users that they can opt-out of Facebook inititatives like Sponsored Stories which you can do here.

We have had great success using Facebook ads to grow fan bases and to drive social promotions and  we hope to continue to so in the future but the backlash from Facebook users might make it harder to do.

Address the problem

Much like Fonzie in Happy Days who had inability in saying he was wrong.  Facebook should announce an about face and reconnect Facebook fans with the pages that they like.

Jumping the shark?

Not sure where the phrase “jumping the shark” came from, as explained in our discussion here is Fonzie from Happy Days actually jumping a shark.  Be sure to send a tweet to Henry Winkler @hwinkler4real.

Until next week

Catch the segment live on Saturday mornings (at 7:40am) when Sean Callanan discuss sports digital with Francis Leach on ABC Grandstand. Tune into ABC Grandstand Breakfast Friday through Monday on ABC Grandstand digital radio.

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Your thoughts?

Do you like this post?  What do you think of this issue facing Facebook? Will brands retreat to Tumblr or even Myspace?