Facebook, I want my friends back

The story here is now that Facebook is willing to be paid by brands to degrade the news feed experience for their users :)

What follows is speculation, but it's easy to imagine that out of a total fanbase, only a certain percentage "catch" your post while it's fresh, before it's buried behind newer stuff coming in from the ever-increasing number of pages people like. While it may have been the case that back in the day the response one got from posting something on a facebook page was much better than it is now, it's also true that facebook was never as popular as it is today and that users' newsfeeds were never as busy as they are now. And as people subscribe to multiple publishers and their attention gets diluted, you can't expect their engagement with all of these pages to remain at pre-growth levels (or grow).

There's another twist to this. Too many posts from pages thumping activity from friends may alienate users. How do you balance these two types of information? Someone's going to get less airtime, and since (I assume) the bulk of posts comes from pages, they get silenced based on whether or not you interacted with them recently and whatever other criteria facebook can come up with. Same for friends you don't care much for.

Whether or not facebook can be more transparent with regards to how it determines which posts to show and which to hide is another issue. Does the average Joe care? Will he mess things up if given controls that are too advanced? Note that Facebook doesn't censor information, it merely filters what you see by default. You can still go to individual pages or profiles and see their full activity.

There also seems to be a backlash against any commercial endeavour facebook may have. "Facebook is selling your information!" - is it? where can I buy this information? is it really selling in the sense that most people would understand? No. But that's the term that is being used. "Facebook is making people pay for airtime!" well, kinda. Personally I think that should be "Facebook is making people pay for ADDITIONAL airtime" for all the reasons stated above. Maybe they got into this mess due to poor communication but I don't buy the "broken on purpose" argument. That's against facebook's interest in the long term.

I don't mean to defend facebook, just bring into discussion the potential complexities behind developments which people tend to imply are malicious.

The add supported model is terrible for social networks and needs to go. If you can afford a computer, smartphone, etc. Then you can pay 5-20$/year for an account.

Free limited accounts for people <18 years old, which have limited access to adult content? (Idea, but may work to both hook future customers, and protect kids)

It does depend upon the page, though. If your posts get high engagement, it will have higher distribution. Of the author's 55k fans, only 14k fans are "talking about" the page, so they'll have less than full distribution. To be frank, their posts are not getting many likes. Thus, my recommendation to just do one great post per day. Also, I would suggest to the author to experiment with photos and not just links with photos. Facebook's push toward bigger photos in the feed is no accident -- they work.

There are definitely brands that have multiple posts per day, and it's largely because of the high engagement their posts drive. Two examples that I follow are "I Fucking Love Science" and "Humans of New York." They both have fewer fans than talking about, and both post multiple times a day. Because their content is highly shared, it gets great distribution. It also depends on your own engagement with the page too, as I understand it.

The best practice I hear about Twitter is to indeed publish multiple times a day. Because it acts more as a true feed and not a digest, repeating the same content at a different hour is considered to be good.