Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have far bigger budgets, and most importantly feel that eyeballs are far more valuable. A visitor landing on one of our news stories likely is worth less than a few cents. A visitor to a consumer retail site could easily be worth hundreds of dollars. Guess who has the budget to bid big on traffic acquisition here.
There isn't that much real estate for advertisers on FB, and with that it has become incredibly expensive for a media company to grow a legit audience through FB anymore as well.
As a regular FB user though, I think this is an interesting move. I stopped using it to see what my friends are up to long ago as everyone moved to Instagram and Snapchat for their daily happenings. Facebook became a news aggregation service for me, much like Twitter. Might just be my friends, but only a handful are active on the service much anymore with daily updates.
Just because your FB shares don't directly feed your traffic doesn't mean they're useless. You might try A/B tracking on promoting stories through FB or not, and see how they track for views.
(Though I've also had experiences with organic spread of stories -- sometimes something just hits a nerve and balloons.)
This change has potential to bring the income way down from that site.
Globalisation in the main is a good thing, but what it has also done is push the smaller retailer out of the market.
The whole idea that "users will engage with your business via Facebook (or any other social media)" is pretty much snake oil. Facebook engages your customer if they can win a price, or they want to complain, loudly and in public. Neither of these things helps your business.
Assuming no click baiting, I would like to see an honest business that could not function, if they where not on Facebook.
The only change I would like to see in the Facebook news feed is the ability to remember that I just want everything sorted by newest first. Perhaps simply the ability to disable "curated feed". My feed is already curated, by me.
For mainstream businesses, like chain supermarket, Coca Cola and car makers, I still maintain it's wasted effort.
I'm working at one of top digital advertising agencies in EU. National and global brands save no buck on their spending on social media presence, and there are plenty of cheap (for them) tricks that result in both additional sales, positive PR and new customers. We also have strong data to back this up and justify our budgets.
Sometimes it costs real peanuts. Its easy to pump sales for soda brand by going to Snapchat with staged clip going "PEOPLE!!! I WANT TO SEE HOW THIS SODA HELPS YOU BEAR WITH CURRENT HEATS!!!" with people in 13-30 range flocking back with clips of them demoing how soda helps them out stay cool. Then brand gifts dozen or two best submissions and next action ran month or two later attracts 120% the number previous one did, word of gifts and possible response from social media make sure of that.
Whats in for, say, Lidl (large market store in EU), when it gives away stuff to guy who complained to them on twitter that he got diarrhea from expired pizza he bought at their place? It lets them save face, improve recognition of their brand and makes more people bring their feedback, allowing them find potential rotten apples within their chain.
For young peopple especially the fact that large brand @'s them on twitter/face/insta or elsewhere is enough to go nuts, go to store, buy crazy amount of brand's product and then stage some photo or clip alone or with friends. And then there are followers who mimic this in hopes of getting social fame as well.
A few questions on the Snapchat thing, if you don't mind: Aren't you just "buying" interaction with the prospect of a potential price? Does it actually increase sales figures significantly, long term and beyond the people that participated? Wouldn't the participant have been very likely to buy the product anyway? I mean they already follow the brand on Snapchat.
Social media is simply new channel in BTL and is important to Brands as they grow the awareness that there's increasing number of people that's simply oblivious to ATL.
As for sales figures, we actually work within targets, sometimes esoteric ones like "get hastag trending on specific day". We also rarely work alone, more often than not being just part of bigger picture happening simultanously. Brand then reviews performance using market research companies or sales figures and tell us results, so its hard to say if sales change would be same or different without us.
As for long term sales, that depends more on Brand's strategy and its reception by the market. Digital is part of this strategy's realisation, but due to nature of the medium, we are playing short game here.
I hate this, but the fact is that small business depend on that. Facebook almost took over the web for most of my friend circle. they spend their lives there and have difficulty in finding stuff when it's not showing up in facebook search.
And google does not help in some cases, try searching for a product information. the first page is mostly shopping garbage.
Not to mention you have a bad experience at a mom and pop and post about it on twitter, it WILL get resolved if the owner has even the slightest amount of sense.
Yes, impossible on the most broad and least targeted campaigns. But there's almost an infinite amount of targeting that you can do that will allow you to bypass anyone with just a tiny budget. You may just not be aware of the fb ad campaign strategies (and targeting options) that you're able to employ.
Please take the time and watch this video: http://youtu.be/7zcVB-awAM0 He's probably one of the most obnoxious presenters ever, but you'll come to appreciate the world of advanced facebook targeting and figure out a way to utilize it for your content marketing strategy.
Not my experience at all. Also, have you seen their hyper-local ad-targeting options? As in, draw circles around neighborhoods, then choose "parents" who are interested in "children's clothing"?
You can easily reach thousands of people with a $5/day budget. They'll even provide the stock photography for free.
They did it with games (they became basically spam until they locked it down). Then when they opened things up to advertising, you could basically run any ad you want to any offer you want. Then they tightened that down once it got adoption. And now they're going to lock the news feed back down a bit.
It's interesting how well they've pulled this off without poisoning the well and alienating their user base.
But that's just me. I find that British tabloids like the Sun look similar -- and they are designed that way to attract rather than repel eyeballs.
[1] http://brutalistwebsites.com/
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...
And for spontaneous events (wanna hang out in the park this afternoon?), facebook group chat is still the common denominator, although that might change with facebook forcing people to install their messenger in order to being able to use it on mobile.
Of course, such apologies always come with the implicit "...but if you don't get on Facebook, it's going to keep happening." I actually started to create a Facebook account, but refused to continue past the point where it asked for my email account credentials in order to construct a friends list from my correspondents.
Yes, I'm aware that's optional and can be bypassed - but when the relationship starts out with a boundary test as blatant and extreme as that, I'm really not interested in hanging around to find out where my new abusive partner is going to decide to go from there.
So I still don't have a Facebook account. As a direct result of this, I also don't have a meaningful social life any more, which is a shame, because I rather enjoyed the one I did have. I'm hardly alone in this. Is it any wonder there are people who want to kill Facebook with a hatchet?
It's just not something people think about, and that worries the hell out of me. We've never before seen a world where a single, rather secretive corporation, which has already shown itself willing to experiment with its users' perceptions in order to better serve its own purposes, mediates practically every interpersonal relationship of a significant fraction of the species. When I was growing up, that would've been nothing but fodder for third-rate dystopian sf, and yet here we are.
Although your comment makes me wonder if there is a space for a more specialised 'events' app. Maybe this is where the Google/Apple calendars are vaguely headed.
You're not one of the users that brings money directly to the fb platform but you help keep the network effect in place.
Obviously Facebook can't be all things to all people, so these types of complaints doesn't really show that Facebook is weak, but rather that it is strong and has a lot of auxiliary users that helps keep core functions valuable.
I have written a blog post about it two years ago.
That's why I don't get into their bandwagon as customer anymore.
Who says they haven't? Just because people endure it for now because everyone else they know uses it doesn't mean they'll all stick around.
Re:ads. So shocked people still bother to buy them at all, seen companies throw 7 figures at it with only a fraction of an investment back from it (1 mil invested got about 80K of product sales IIRC). Always advise wayyyy against it these days.
My feed is much more manageable since I started hiding just about all the pages, leaving it pretty much solely picture and text posts of people I know.
Like you, I found myself doing the "quick scroll through" until I finally deactivated my account.
Yes, you can group your friends and just share with some of them, but who has time for that?
I'm even hesitant to write anything in semi-open groups as I'm not sure if what I write will show up on my friends wall. It's not like what I'm writing is extreme or private, I just don't need it to be actively shared with all my "friends.
It's interesting that facebook got it initially right, and NEVER implemented 'who's viewed your profile/picture' - as they know that this (possibility of others seeing our actions) would greatly reduce our actions/viewing (us fearing it being visible).
WHILE now, they're not getting it right and publish our actions (likes/comments) like a mad spammer.
It looks like they crossed the border while playing with our curiosity what-others-do, but forgotten that this means, that our actions need to be revealed to others also which will make us reluctant the moment we understand implications.
Snow ball effect to come?
In this regard, Facebook has always seemed like it wanted people to overshare with everybody (it's been proven with its blunders on the privacy front). Now the same overload is causing fatigue among its users (at least to some extent).
I'm frustrated that Google+ has been stagnant like a beta service without new features or even addressing usability issues to make it better for years now (vanity URLs for groups/users - still no; changing group privacy after creation - still no; and many other annoyances).
Gotta love addiction optimization, one of the many wonderful sciences the modern age has brought us. See also: drop rate optimization in games.
That's exactly how I feel. Facebook shows to me, to the right side of the screen, a feed of all the comments and likes my friends make everywhere on the site, even on pages I don't like or on walls of people who are not my friends. It's like some kind of "spy mode" which makes me reluctant to comment anywhere (what if my friends will read it?).
No filtering, no reordering by 'importance', no weighting by how often I 'like' or respond. No "you clicked off the page and back, we're gonna show you different stuff!".
Just a simple time-ordered list. Apparently this desire is wrong.
Because it's not profitable.
From your Profile page > About tab, then Contact and Basic Info. Click on the pen icon to edit your birthday and you'll see a dropdown to determine who can see the date and/or year of your birth. I've got mine set to "Only me".
I'd never thought of that, but it works and its better for staying in contact than FB's features. It's a Slack-lite.
FB could easily destroy it by putting ads in Messenger, and they probably will.
This is simply to be able to charge companies more for sneaking their content into your so-called FriendsAndFamilyAndHighPaidAdContent.
In other news: Tesla can give you any model you want. If you pay.
Wonder how this will affect the political discourse for the elections this year...
Honestly it's pretty hard do discus Facebook, what Facebook does, what it's used for and how people see it, because it's so different from person to person.
you are really lucky
Facebook already has tools to hide posts from certain friends or shares of links to certain publishers (click the disclosure arrow in the top right).
I think the basis for all these "post selection algorithms" that people are continually outraged about is the fact that people are completely unwilling to prune their feeds. Then they get overwhelmed with crap posts and complain about how there's nothing interesting. Then Facebook/Twitter try to figure out what people want to see, and people complain they don't get to see everything.
The thing is I don't want to prune those publishers because if I have to see any non-Friend posts I want to see it from them. But I just wish that real humans were weighted higher than another LeBron story by ESPN.
Not so great a move if you're a news publisher who has invested time in optimizing your reach on Facebook, though...
Often, there is "See less of X person", "See less of this kind of post", "Unfolow X person" and other other similar options.
I use it all the time and ended up with a feed that doesn't change much (maybe one new post per day, but that contains content I actually care about.
Today people do not even mention it anymore. Wether i meet new people or when i connect with old friends. Facebook disappeared from my life as quickly as it came in.
Do HN people still use Facebook?
I put events on there, occasionally a few holiday photos or whatever, and check updates on my commute. I defriend people I'm no longer close to, and hide as much political news as I can, so mainly I see photos, personal-blog-like posts, and events. It's great for short-notice events - if I see someone's going to something cool tonight I can ask if they want to meet up. It's great.
So I got back. I rarely browse the timeline. My phone only has the Messenger installed.
And as I said in an earlier comment, small business pretty much depend on it where I live. People don't browse the web anymore, they just use facebook (and it's sad and pathetic..)
I use lists extensively to organize friends into groups (work, school, various hobbies). The number of unread posts in a list appears next to it, so I can see the amount of activity in each at a glance instead of endlessly scrolling.
If I really care to see what someone is up to, I just go to their profile.
Maybe it's due to my age bracket (early 20's), but having a an account is a major social benefit and I don't have everyone's email address.
[1] https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator - Highly recommend this, it's a great anti-time-waste plugin.
Really it makes sense all around though, and you have to wonder what took them so long.
I hope this encourages news organisations to disentangle themselves from tech companies as fast as possible.
[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/washington-post...