Have you noticed lately how your newsfeed in Facebook has become inundated with advertisements and pages promoting products and agendas of various news sites, brands and companies? What exactly is your newsfeed? It’s your timeline on which you see pages and pages of content, irrelevant articles pushed by news companies, advertisements and product selling pages pushed by brands and various commercial content.
What happens is that you see very little content relating to your friends and family. In short, you get less of social networking and more of promoted content. But all that is about to change for the better after Zuckerberg announced a change in the presentation of Facebook Newsfeed yesterday.
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There is such a thing called an algorithm and your news feed isn’t an unlimited space in terms of technicalities. Thus if you suddenly decided to view for example a news bulletin or video content, a news site, or a brand promoting a brand sale, the algorithms picks up your preference and continues showing you more of that on your timeline or news feed.
If you clicked on an article pushed by a page owned by a blog website, then you will start seeing more of that too every day as an algorithm after all is artificial intelligence that doesn’t possess the common sense to understand you’ve just viewed the content out of curiosity and just because you liked it that doesn’t mean you want to see everything that site pushes every day.
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What happens is that more and more of such content shows up on your news feed and that friend whose content you didn’t click on or liked or shared, slowly gets relegated to the background all because of limited space. Thus the algorithm interprets your clicks as your preference. You see more commercial content and less of social content related to family and friends. But!! Mark Zuckerberg has realized that and is now going back to Facebook roots to change this for your benefit.
Yesterday the 12th of January 2018 was a significant day for Facebook users fed up of their news feed being cluttered by commercialization. Zuckerberg has ordered the entire revamping of Facebook’s algorithm to boost and promote more meaningful posts from friends and family. This means Facebook is now going back to its roots to be more the social network it was meant to be and not just a place for news sites and brands to push their wares.
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Why Zuckerberg should get a huge pat on the back and support for such a move is that the social network will have to implement such a move at the cost of showing less ads and commercial content all because you newsfeed as I mentioned earlier is limited in space. This means all those posts of family and friends who you may not have interacted with will show up more on your timeline instead of being pushed into the background to make space for commercial content.
Now it will be just the opposite, where commercial news feeds will be cut down to make way for more social content. Meaningful social posts will now feature more on a users news feed at the expense of commercial posts by news companies and brands.
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Said Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of News Feed “Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses,”
Facebook today depends heavily on interaction and engagement to track and analyze what users prefer to see on their Newsfeed but that is determined by a bot or algorithm. Thus any post that receives a lot of reactions, shares and comments were automatically boosted as these were identified as your preferences in your network.
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Mosseri also issued a warning statement to news organizations and companies that were classified as pages to see “reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease”. This is bound to raise several concerns for those brands, companies and organizations that rely on Facebook to distribute their content and help audience redirection to their websites.
Mossieri also said that Facebook will penalize those websites and pages that post content regarded as engagement bait or click bait that solicits a response or manipulate a response from users such as likes, comments and shares just for the sake of a higher reach on the network.
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A news release on Facebook news of December 18, 2017, said “People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions. For example, “LIKE this if you’re an Aries!” This tactic, known as “engagement bait,” seeks to take advantage of our News Feed algorithm by boosting engagement in order to get greater reach. So, starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts from people and Pages that use engagement bait.”
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Facebook’s new initiative is to make people happier about using the social network in a positive way. This they felt has now become a challenge especially since the social networking giant has been accused of disseminating misinformation and reinforcing partisan political communities.
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With regards to the announcement, Zuckerberg posted “We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us; we feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being.”
However, hers the big disadvantage not to you but for Facebook itself. This is why Facebook needs all the support it can get in improving the social site to be more considerate for socializing between families and friends instead of relentless brand promotion. Zuckerberg’s announcement invited a big backlash in the stock market that cost him a loss of billions overnight.
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The co-founder of what is now the world’s largest social media business was greeted with a huge drop in his fortune by $2.9 billion immediately after issuing the statement. This has not cut down his fortune to $74 .4 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Now you may feel big deal!! He lost 2 billion but is still a multi-billionaire, but that’s not the point. The point is that Zuckerberg is finally taken a stand even at the act of losing money and that is to make Facebook more meaningful and connective for you with family and friends rather than a brand greeting you in the morning.
Even shares of The California based social media giant tumbled to the tune of 3.9% by noon in New York and if it continues, he may well lose his position as the fourth richest person who will now be Amancio Ortega, the Spanish retail Billionaire. Zuckerberg 33 added $4.5 billion to his fortune this year.
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While the news is good about the initiative of the change in Facebook Newsfeed and Zuckerberg's intentions are good when he posted on his wall saying “We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you'll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.”
However, the move invited mixed emotions where some felt that Facebook shouldn’t cut down content that many find informative and beneficial for improving their daily lives in a positive way and which they look forward to every day more than meaningless posts by various friends. Facebook is, after all, a combined experience and love it or hate it; can we really do without it?
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