One Month Later, Eat24 Stands By Its Breakup With Facebook

Eat24 has no regrets about quitting Facebook. One month after the company’s Dear John letter to the social network went viral, Eat24 says its digital marketing results are stronger than ever.

In fact, “App installs from the week following our breakup letter totaled 1.75x more than we got from all our 2013 paid Facebook ad campaigns combined,” Eat24 wrote in a blog post last week.

Eat24 also reports that its weekly email open rate — a steady 20% when it had a Facebook page — has increased each week since the deletion with its most recent rate at 40%. And while the causality of that correlation would be hard to prove, there’s no doubt Eat24 believes it hasn’t lost any connection to customers. The bottom line from the company’s Life After Facebook post:

“TL; DR: breaking up with Facebook was the best marketing move we made all year. Although we do feel bad for hurting Facebook’s feelings, causing such a stir, and dragging them through all the he said she said drama.”

Sure that TLDR note came near the end of the blog post, but that’s how the company rolls — with irreverent online messaging that’s just a little off kilter.

The humor of the original breakup letter in March caught people’s attention, but it also tapped into serious frustration many marketers are having with reduced organic reach on the Facebook.

By now, we’re all well aware of the issue. Because of more competition for limited space on users’ News Feeds and changes in the Facebook algorithm to reward quality, fewer updates from brand Pages are reaching people who have liked those Pages. Facebook suggests marketers use targeted advertising to reach more consumers.

Eat24 said it tried that strategy but wasn’t pleased with the results, so on April 1 it deleting its Facebook page and the 70,000 likes it had accumulated there.

Not everyone thought that was a good idea, as Eat24 notes:

But everything wasn’t all wine and roses and nacho cheese fondue fountains. While most people were happy for us, some people (namely our fellow marketing professionals) felt like we needed a little tough love and self-reflection… which is a nice way of saying our breakup letter made them really f***ing angry, and they took to the comment section to let us know just how angry they were about it. We read each and every one of them (because we care) and you can too if you want, but we decided to save you some time and summarize all criticisms here:

A lot of you called us cheap for not wanting to spend money to promote our page or invest in Facebook advertising. The fact is that we’re totally willing to spend money (on stuff that works). In fact, we poured $1 million into Facebook last year. No joke (Just ask Dave from Accounting, he cries about it every day).

Funny story: App installs from the week following our breakup letter totaled 1.75x more than we got from all our 2013 paid Facebook ad campaigns combined. So… if we add the breakup installs to the paid ad installs, the ROI for that $1 million Facebook budget actually looks pretty good!

Read the rest of Eat24’s update on the company blog.