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Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#101

Post by FussyZeus »

stdbrouw wrote: post #48
mrweasel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking businesses doesn't have to be on Facebook. It was cool and all when Facebook was the new hotness, but at this point it's wasted energi. 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…

Check out the Facebook pages of mom and pop stores, grocers and other local businesses in your area. Chances are you'll see a lot of interaction with loyal customers. Check out the Facebook pages of your favorite musicians, lots of interaction there too. It's not because you don't see it that it doesn't exist.

^ This. I don't bother with McDonald's Facebook but the theatre round our town that's somehow still operating doesn't have a website, they just have Facebook and Twitter. To small businesses those social networks can be a Godsend. Solid web presence that's stable and gets their name out.

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.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#102

Post by anthony_romeo »

bezaorj wrote: post #98
delecti wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hide the source. "Mary liked this" hide all from HuffPo, "Steve liked this" hide all from Energy Crystals Whatever, "Joe liked this" hide all from Sue McWhoever (you've never met her anyway). 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.

I'd do that, but it would be a battle fought daily, one at a time, against individual friends of friends you never met... A "Hide all posts from friends of friends" option would be great but not that interesting for Facebook.

It actually is pretty effective. I went through an unfollowing frenzy a couple weeks ago and my feed became far less cluttered since. I'm glad Facebook is making some adjustments, because absent aggressive unfollowing the news feed became even more of a waste of time than it already was.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#103

Post by Ralfp »

mrweasel wrote: post #94
Ralfp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'll assume you're right, because you actually work with this. 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 Sn…

Their participation in activation usually makes some of their followers/friends to try their chances as well (or just buy it to see whats so great about it). Those people will try the product themselves and hopefully some will pick a liking for it and even recommend it further.

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.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#104

Post by habosa »

cannam wrote: post #61
habosa wrote: post #3

This might get me to browse a little bit more. I have about 1000 friends on Facebook but 60℅ of my feed is news from a small group of publishers (ESPN, The Onion, NYT) and ads.

Completely OT and I apologise, but I've just noticed that your "60%" doesn't use the percent sign but instead ℅, a symbol I'd never seen before that appears to be the abbreviation for "care of". I'm fascinated by that -- how did that get there? What kind of keyboard did you use?

Huh good catch. Google Keyboard on Android has both symbols and they're only 4 keys apart. I hit the wrong one.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#105

Post by habosa »

kalleboo wrote: post #10
habosa wrote: post #3

This might get me to browse a little bit more. I have about 1000 friends on Facebook but 60℅ of my feed is news from a small group of publishers (ESPN, The Onion, NYT) and ads.

Is that because your friends keep resharing posts from those publishers or because you're following the publishers themselves? 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 u…

It's not reshares, it's from the publishers themselves. I must have 'Liked' them at some point.

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.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#106

Post by throwanem »

tyfon wrote: post #22
itchyouch wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's it. I use it purely for answering invitations to events and a handy address book. Otherwise my social media time is away from FB, though, I still spend time on FB in the form of Instagram.

I deleted my FB account several years ago and you'd be surprised how many actually find my email when they want to invite me for something. If someone can't be bothered to send me an email I'm not too concerned about going to their party.

I never had one, and you'd be surprised how many don't. This has caused me to miss camping trips, parties, dinners, and weddings. Of course it's possible that I'm just such an obnoxious person that nobody wants me around, but if that were the case, I doubt I'd have received such abject and clearly heartfelt apologies from people who didn't invite me to things because I wasn't on their Facebook friends list.

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?

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#107

Post by gvurrdon »

james_pm wrote: post #74
gvurrdon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and the ability to conceal my birthday from everyone, would go some way towards persuading me to use it.

For the birthday thing: 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".

Thanks, I didn't realise that it was possible to hide it; if it is possible to conceal both date and year then that leaves only the timeline, sinister data collection and general tediousness as issues.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#108

Post by dchuk »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #53
dchuk wrote: post #6

This is how Facebook operates. Open up the platform until everyone piles on and basically ruins it, then tighten it back up and start charging those same people to do what they were previously doing 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 t…

> It's interesting how well they've pulled this off without poisoning the well and alienating their user base. 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 ab…

well, they still have well over a billion active users. They've alienated some, but it's barely a blip on their radar it seems.

Re: Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

#110

Post by newscracker »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #25
ryanSrich wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I don't think I've ever used Facebook for anything productive (like RSVPing to something). My newsfeed is a complete and utter wasteland, but there's something interesting and addicting about it. It's like watching a car wreck. It's awful, but you can't look away.

I find Facebook pages visually ugly -- unpleasant to look at at a level that has nothing to do with my opinions about the site. 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.

Facebook is overall ugly in appearance with a bad layout, bad column widths, bad fonts, bad font sizes...the list grows. Lot of clutter in a small space is how I see it.
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