Fortune magazine this week describes how Facebook’s change to the Timeline layout has killed business pages and the billion dollar industry in maintaining those pages.
According to Mashable, views of Facebook business pages have halved since the timeline feature was introduced which in turn has destroyed the markets of businesses like Buddy Media and Vitrue who were making a good living from setting up corporate Facebook pages.
Once again this shows the danger of being locked into one service or platform to do business – you genuinely have all your eggs in one basket.
Whether it’s relying on only one customer or one supplier, the business who is locked into a single channel risks ruin whenever the owners of that channel decide to change something.
In Facebook’s case, it isn’t greed or simply bastardry that has killed these businesses, just an unintended consequence of an improvement to their service.
For many businesses throwing all there resources onto social media platforms, they should remember that Facebooks – or Twitter, LinkedIn, Google’s or Pinterest’s – business objectives are not necessarily theirs and any business partnership is at best unequal.
If you’re going to depend upon one customer or supplier, at least make sure you’re making a fat profit to cover the risk that losing them will kill your existing business.