You follow a band you like because you want to know about their upcoming performances and new music. You follow an artist you like to see new stuff they're working on and when they post it online. You follow your favorite family owned restaurant to see what specials they have and when they're doing a wine tasting. You follow your favorite local bar to find out when trivia night is.
There are a ton of reasons to follow things that aren't friends. And Facebook was a great way to track all that stuff. Now, it isn't, because Facebook changed the algorithm. You can still find it if you manually click on the Pages Feed, which is handy for folks who know it's there. But most people don't, so most of what you take the time to post on Facebook as a business is barely seen by anyone.
To be fair, half the time people sign up for purely symbolic reasons, or to participate in a "like us on Facebook to win.." competition and not necessarily because they want daily ads for $brand served to them in between their friends' baby pics and obscure links posted by some guy they once met at an airport.
If you really want regular updates from a vendor you sign up to their mailing list...
But the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for updates you actually want to receive, because there's always been a huge volume of content with imperfect filters in place; if you really want to check on a brand you either go direct to their Facebook page which is entirely unaffected by filter algorithms or follow them on Twitter or by email. Users who only ever saw a fraction of the brand communications in their main feed anyway aren't particularly upset by changes in the filter that mean they see an even smaller percentage (if they get more friend updates instead they might even see it as a net win). Brands whose free advertising reaches 1-2% of eyeballs rather than 10-20% of the ones upset here, as with the Gmail "promotions" tab.
Eat24's marketing team aren't stupid: they know this which is why you don't get coupon offers on Facebook, you get meme graphics, jokes about food and pictures of pizza. You get coupon offers by email without the jokes or on Twitter with them.
Edit: disagreement by downvoting is particularly lame when it comes without an explanation of why I'm supposedly wrong. You don't see everything that every person or brand has posted in your newsfeed, haven't done for a long time, and in practice wouldn't do without a lot of scrolling even if they didn't filter at all. Whether Facebook's intent in filtering Pages posts to your feed more aggressively than Friend posts to your feed is purely commercial, purely driven by user engagement metrics or something in between, it's hardly a new development or something that only applies to brands.
> "the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for updates you actually want to receive"
Yes it was. It was great for me for several years. I blocked games and kept my friends list to actual friends, and I was easily able to keep up with peoples' lives AND with products/companies I followed.
Eventually they changed the algorithm enough times, and hid/removed enough options, that I couldn't keep up. I posted a mini-rant in the comments here about it -- how FB's algorithm decided it was more important that I see a random not-very-close high school friend post an offensive political meme than that I see my brother's wedding pictures.
The only things I follow on Facebook are things I actually want to see on Facebook: 2 friend's bands, a watchmaker I like, a casting agency to let a couple friends know when something fits for them, etc. I don't have any 'like us to win' or symbolic/guilt likes.
There are a ton of reasons to follow things that aren't friends. And Facebook was a great way to track all that stuff. Now, it isn't, because Facebook changed the algorithm. You can still find it if you manually click on the Pages Feed, which is handy for folks who know it's there. But most people don't, so most of what you take the time to post on Facebook as a business is barely seen by anyone.