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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

#51

Post by ctack »

itchyouch wrote: post #12
NegativeLatency wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I've been alienated, and many of my non techie friends have been too, but the network effect is just too strong and pulls you back in when old-so-and-so plans their birthday party or whatever.

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.

Thankfully facebook events never really took off in my social groups. Currently it's just a couple of Watsapp groups (core friends/activities/classes) and an increasingly daunting email thread for a wedding later this summer.

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.

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

#52

Post by lostlogin »

Jaruzel wrote: post #44
jacobush wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They (FB) prey on us with perceived or actual low enough social standing for us to not be found by email.

My email address is so obvious, in fact you can even work it out from my user id, however that still doesn't stop my so-called 'friends' telling me they didn't know how to contact me during my FB detox periods. Some people just don't want the friction that having to actually send an email, brings. Go figure.

Someone always hits 'reply all' and ruins it for everyone.

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

#53

Post by intoverflow2 »

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 about 80K of product sales IIRC). Always advise wayyyy against it these days.

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

#54

Post by Nursie »

All I want from facebook is a time-ordered list of everything all my friends post.

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.

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

#55

Post by wodenokoto »

itchyouch wrote: post #12
NegativeLatency wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I've been alienated, and many of my non techie friends have been too, but the network effect is just too strong and pulls you back in when old-so-and-so plans their birthday party or whatever.

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.

From a business point of view that is okay.

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.

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

#56

Post by okto84 »

>The side effect of those changes, the company said, is that content posted by publishers will show up less prominently in news feeds, resulting in significantly less traffic to the hundreds of news media sites that have come to rely on Facebook.

Then, I might use facebook less than usual.

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

#57

Post by mrweasel »

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.

For very local or niche businesses I would say you're right. It's much easier, and cheaper for them and their customer to just maintain a Facebook page, rather than trying to build a website. I don't see a way for Facebook making money of these companies though. It's the companies that bring the audience to Facebook in this case, not the other way around. Facebook in these cases are just a glorified mailing lists.

For mainstream businesses, like chain supermarket, Coca Cola and car makers, I still maintain it's wasted effort.

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

#58

Post by cocotino »

system16 wrote: post #11

I guess they need to do something to increase engagement because - anecdotally, yes - the amount of sharing and engagement in my feed has dropped dramatically in recent years. A rough guess would be ~3/4 of the content I see now are just likes/reactions and comments my friends made on other content (usually articles or memes). I'm sure most of my friends have no idea I'm seeing this, and if they did they would probab…

> I'm sure most of my friends have no idea I'm seeing this, and if they did they would probably interact with FB even less. I'm very hesitant to interact with FB at all now, and just do a quick scroll through every other day.

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?).

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

#59

Post by pmontra »

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.

It's not just you. Maybe FB is not an example of brutalist design [1] [2] because it's more polished that true brutalists are. It's just a plain vanilla site. Instead of thousands of different layouts on myspace and even on blogger, it's a one size fit all design. A white and blue page should be enough for everybody, and it seems it is, especially when it has the size of an app on a phone. Remember that the vast majority of its users didn't have any web property before their page and feed on FB. They don't find anything missing.

[1] http://brutalistwebsites.com/

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05...

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

#60

Post by melvinmt »

sharkweek wrote: post #18

As someone who runs a niche news site, it's hard to see the point focusing on running a Facebook page anymore. We kind of go through the motions to keep up with appearances, but Facebook is less than 5% of our total overall traffic, and 95% of that portion is all from individuals sharing our content, not from our page directly. It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have…

> It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have far bigger budgets

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.

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