Room Escape Artist

I’m not the guy who complains about every little change that every tech platform makes. I’ve been designing complex software for years and I get the complexity.

When I say that the latest Facebook Newsfeed updates are terrible, I mean it.

They are a disaster for small businesses like escape rooms.

What’s Going On?

Mark Zuckerberg did his 50 states tour and decided that Facebook needed to focus on creating “meaningful interaction.”

He said, “We want to make sure that our products are not just fun, but are good for people.”

As a result, the newsfeed now supposedly emphasizes “friends and family” (NYTimes).

In practicality, this means:

• Content posted by your family should appear more readily in your feed.
• Content from Facebook Pages of companies that you’ve liked will appear less frequently.
• News content will appear more often… so long as it’s been posted by a friend.
• Content from Facebook groups you’ve joined will show up all over your feed.

For me personally, this means that my Facebook feed consists of humorless political postings from the people that I know, discussions from the various escape room-related Facebook groups that I’m a member of… and lots and lots and lots and lots of escape room post-game photos.

This means that I’m looking at Facebook a whole lot less. So maybe this is a good thing?

Back to the point.

What Does This Mean For Escape Rooms & Players?

Organic Reach

The organic reach of Facebook pages has been slashed.

This means that the Facebook content posted by businesses will surface naturally at a much lower rate.

Facebook wants businesses to pay to have their content surfaced. This isn’t new. While they’ve been operating this way for years, they’ve kept the organic numbers at least reasonable while regularly pummeling the page-owner with notifications about the treasures that will come if and only if they give Facebook some money to promote their content.

To me, these notifications always read like Nigerian Prince emails without the charm.

Update 11:45AM – This is a high performing post! Facebook wants money to make more people see it.

The Effect

The Facebook user clicks “like” on pages of interest. The user is literally asking for the content. Facebook, however, algorithmically withholds it because it’s an easy chokepoint to generate revenue.

For players this means that when your favorite local escape room business announces that it has a new room, you won’t see this unless the escape room pays enough money that Facebook chooses to grace your eyeballs with the announcement.

It means that if you follow Room Escape Artist or other blogs through Facebook, you will see our content less frequently.

More importantly, it means that your local escape room businesses will likely have to spend a lot more money with Facebook to get the results that they need to operate. This will dramatically favor larger businesses who can more easily absorb the added cost.

What Can I Do About It?

You – as a player, a fan of escape rooms, and a reader of this site – have a few options to limit the damage that this shift will create:

• Use your web browser as a browser and favorite your local escape room companies and Room Escape Artist.  Click over to them from time to time. Visit on your own terms, not because an algorithm selected the content for you.
• Subscribe to emails. A good portion of our readership subscribes to receive emails when we publish content. Just about every escape room company out there sends out promotions and information via email.
• If you can’t kick the Facebook habit, and believe me, I get that too… click “like,” leave a comment, or share content that you support. Boosting the signal helps.
• Another option for those committed to Facebook is to use their oddly buried subscription feature to make sure that content is served up:

When you like a page’s content, go to the page and next to the “Like” button you’ll find the “Following” button. Click that and update your setting to “See First.”

Advice For Owners

So far, we haven’t seen a significant dip in traffic as a result of this because we’ve never put a heavy emphasis on Facebook as a distribution platform. Our feeling is that we distribute to all sensible channels and let our readers decide how they will interact with us. Facebook happens to be one channel.

Our site is built on open source technology. We distribute easily to RSS and our email subscription is simple. Our preference is that people use the website as a website because that’s the only thing we can control.

We’ve taken this approach because we don’t trust Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Medium, and others to put our interests first. We’ll use them, but we won’t count on them.

Advertising and marketing is a lot of work. Make a conscious strategy. Don’t rely on one platform. Measure your results and refocus on the things that work. Don’t let yourself get lulled into a false sense of security with a single platform.

If one thing is certain about tech companies, it’s the promise of endless change… which may or may not be in your favor.