Last week, Laura and I were discussing how the reach of OPLIN’s sponsored Facebook posts was declining, and whether we should raise the amount we pay. The next day, Facebook announced a major overhaul to its newsfeed algorithm, prioritizing activity from friends and family over content from pages and publishers. What are libraries to do? Pay more for less reach? Or try to find ways of engaging patrons so posts get shared more widely?
- Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share [New York Times | Mike Isaac] “Publishers, nonprofits, small business and many other groups rely on the social network to reach people, so de-emphasizing their posts will most likely hurt them.“
- Facebook’s Latest Fix for Fake News: Ask Users What They Trust [Wired | Stephen Lam] “There’s a good chance the new policy could cause as many problems as it solves. For the best known media brands, the survey could be a leg up. But what about niche publications that have narrow, but credible readerships?”
- Facebook Is Deprioritizing Our Stories. Good. [Motherboard | Jason Koebler] “Journalism that is engineered to be viral, to be liked or picked by an algorithm is not journalism, it’s marketing. A news media whose existence relies on a centralized portal is subject to the whims of that portal. And a society that relies on a centralized portal to get its news may very well be doomed.”
- How to prepare for the removal of publisher posts from Facebook’s news feed [Medium | Simon Galperin] “In the coming year, Facebook will likely split the news feed. Non-promoted posts from Facebook pages will be placed in a secondary feed. When the company tested the format in Slovakia in 2017, Facebook pages saw two-thirds to three-quarters of their reach disappear.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- Woolf, Nicky. “How Facebook Ate the World.” New Statesman, vol. 147, no. 5400, 05 Jan. 2018, p. 26.
- McNamee, Roger. “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us.” Washington Monthly, vol. 50, no. 1-3, Jan-Mar2018, p. 33.
- Mochon, Daniel, et al. “What Are Likes Worth? A Facebook Page Field Experiment.” Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), vol. 54, no. 2, Apr. 2017, pp. 306-317.
