Popular Food-Delivery Service Eat24 Takes to Facebook to Break up with Zuckerberg

Eat24, a popular food-delivery website, broke up with Facebook this week through a very public exchange with Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth. The site, which has more than 70,000 “likes” on the popular social website, addressed Facebook in a blog post, seeming to parody actress Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin’s announcement of their “conscious uncoupling” on Paltrow’s website Goop last week.

“Dear Facebook, Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk,” the post began. From there, the company launched into a craftily worded, entirely insulting assault on the way Facebook’s algorithm constantly changes, making it impossible for businesses, like Eat24, to keep up and be competitive on the service. “Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back,” Eat24 wrote of Facebook.

Brandon McCormick, communications director for Facebook, responded with an equally witty response to the company. “And we used to love your jokes about tacquitos and 420 but now they don’t seem so funny.” That attitude, the one demonstrating how little Facebook cares about one fleeing business, speaks to Facebook’s overall attitude.

Not the First Company to Complain About Facebook’s Algorithms

While Eat24’s strong words toward Facebook are unarguably the most explosive — and hilarious — in recent memory, the fact is that the company is not alone in its distaste of the platform’s ever changing algorithm. In one of the most well-known outcries against the service, PubChase, a scientific community for sharing ideas and essays, spoke out about the fake likes and poor reach they received after paying for an ad on the surface. Their account and others similar to Eat24’s are far more common than Facebook wants its business users to believe.

Facebook Will Get Along Just Fine

The thing that so many businesses fail to grasp is that Facebook doesn’t need them. The company made more than $2 billion a quarter last year, with some analysts estimating their marketing revenue will explode to $6 billion a quarter by 2015. Oh, and here’s the salient point: Facebook has 1.3 billion active users, or 1.3 billion pairs of eyes that it can help businesses get their brands in front of for relatively little money. Until the user-base starts dropping — spoilers: that won’t be anytime soon — businesses like Eat24 need Facebook more than Facebook needs them.Interestingly enough, Eat24, the tantrum throwing company that it is, is the perfect example of what businesses stand to lose when they go off “the Book.” Even if the company’s complaints have weight, 74% of its user-base on the site are real people that buy its products. If Eat24 goes through with its ill-planned “break up” with Facebook, it will lose a valuable line of communication with nearly 52,000 people. Facebook, for its part, won’t lose a thing.