🔒Facebook’s future impact on businesses

The times are a-changing, and so is Facebook.

It’s no wonder many businesses are unnerved with Facebook’s instability. After all, businesses of all sizes have built much (if not their entire) marketing and PR strategy around the platform. With uncertainty brewing because of global and national issues facing the company, it’s a worthwhile exercise to analyze Facebook’s situation and evaluate what the impact could be on its users.

I recently moderated a fireside chat at West Hartford Coworking with David Ryan Polgar, a pioneering tech ethicist, global speaker, and founder of All Tech is Human. Polgar highlighted some of the prominent and problematic issues facing the platform.

Here are a few key takeaways.

Don’t put all your eggs in one platform

Facebook’s advertising capabilities are unmatched. Businesses realize that with a small budget they can target the exact customer they want and deliver a personalized message that can be measured.

It seems too good to be true. But, as the old saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, well, you know where this is going.

Legal problems have come to light because of Facebook’s advertising methods. From racial discrimination to providing inflated and misleading metrics, Facebook has lost a great deal of trust with how it conducts its business.

Companies that have built their entire communication effort around amassing likes and followers should be leery of the actual success that it brings and the ethical dilemmas it can force.

If Polgar was advising a business on how to use Facebook now, he would suggest approaching it as a tool to gather leads and information that can be used for other time-tested methods of communication.

For example, “Email is like the cockroach,” Polgar says. It has not only survived through the social media revolution, it has thrived. It is not as susceptible to the spamming, inaccurate metrics, and other challenges found on social media.

Polgar’s advice is that Facebook and other social media can be a great way to help build an email list that you own and have more control over.

The “R” word

It looks inevitable — regulation is coming for Facebook. In an op-ed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even asked for it. The question now is not so much will Facebook be regulated, but when will it happen and how stringent will it be?

It may even come to the point where big tech companies like Facebook are broken up. Some believe Facebook is too monopolistic because of the other giant companies they have acquired, like Instagram and Whatsapp. Another consideration is that Facebook and other platforms might be treated as a public utility instead of a private company.

If it rises to that level, it is unlikely Facebook will be able to maintain the same level of advertising prowess it had before. That means if a business’ main marketing strategy is Facebook, it will be weakened.

While this is a doomsday scenario for Facebook, even minor regulation, which is more likely, could create disruptions with the way businesses use the platform to advertise. It is definitely a development to follow and be prepared for.

Read the fine print

In a York University/UConn study, researchers found that 98 percent of people would give their first-born child away because of not reading the user agreement.

Polgar says not only do we not know what’s in the user agreements that we automatically click “yes” to, but we also fail to recognize that the contracts often have some kind of language declaring that the platforms can change the agreement at any time.

The takeaway — platforms have almost total control over you (and might even own your first-born). We just assume that our social media pages are our property when really it’s more like we are renting property from the platforms.

So, understand that if you build your entire communication operation on Facebook, you are at the mercy of the landlord. Just another reason to diversify your communication efforts — even if it means using the more traditional, unsexy methods of reaching your audience.

Of course, none of this is to say Facebook should be abandoned. It is still one of the most powerful tools available, but it is just a tool and not a panacea.

So, just make sure that as it’s changing you do, too.

Adam Chiara is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Hartford.