Facebook Journalism Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik and Scott Hershkowitz, who handles strategic partner development in sports and media for the social network, offered 12 best practices for media companies’ Facebook pages in a note on the Facebook + Media page.
Facebook has been pushing users to share more of what they love, especially through structured status updates. Users can now post visual stories that say they’re watching “Game of Thrones,” or “The Big Bang Theory,” and those preferences will be added to users’ Timelines under favorite shows. But does liking a show’s Facebook page necessarily correlate to watching it? In a recent study, CitizenNet discovered that a 3 percent increase in likes for a show’s page usually translates into a 1 percent bump in viewership.
Facebook users who have ever started to type status updates or comments and then had second thoughts: You are not alone. According to a study by Carnegie Mellon University PhD Student Sauvik Das and Facebook Data Scientist Adam Kramer, 71 percent of the 3.9 million Facebook users profiled self-censored at least one post or comment over a 17-day period.
Facebook’s News Feed is sorted by an algorithm that many people call EdgeRank. It weighs not only the timeliness of posts, but their relevance to users. Facebook wants to make sure that the posts users see within News Feed are the ones they’ll be most likely to engage with. It’s why users tend to see posts from pages they’ve commented on and friends they’ve shared with more often than pages and people they don’t really post about. Mike Maghsoudi of PostRocket and Facebook expert Jon Loomer both explained the algorithm in posts recently.
Not everyone is a fan of Facebook’s post-sorting algorithm, which determines News Feed placement based on with whom users would be most likely to engage. But if you’re trying to see more of your best friend’s Facebook posts, or fewer from a habitual oversharer, there is a way to set these preferences.
Facebook officially confirmed that it will roll out the addition of emoticons and actions in status updates, which many users already have access to, saying that U.S. users will get the new feature “in the coming weeks.”
Facebook wants to know how more of its users are feeling and what they’re doing, as the emoticons and actions it began testing in status updates in January are being rolled out to more users.
English writer Charles Caleb Colton said in the 1800s, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” In April 2013, professional networking site LinkedIn flattered Facebook by adding a mentions feature that auto-fills the names of contacts or companies in its status update box.
Remember the kindergarten game, “Show and Tell?” Based on its more mobile-friendly News Feed redesign, it appears that Facebook will now be more show than tell — or, to be more precise, it will be burying the tell in billions of pictures. The shift to a “personal newspaper” format with larger and more prominent photo displays is a response to photo-driven behavior that has rapidly changed the social media landscape. Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says 50 percent of all posts are now pictures, double the amount from just one year ago.
We know that Facebook has roughly 618 million mobile users, but how are they interacting with the social network from their smartphones? A comprehensive study by Facebook and IDC shows that most users on mobile check their News Feeds frequently. Several users copped to checking Facebook from their phones at the movies and while they’re at the gym.
