Facebook News Feed Changes: Despite reports that young people are snubbing Facebook, other indicators point to rising engagement levels among its 1.3 billion users. According to Forbes, as of the end of March, 63% of those users login on any given day and the proportion of users who log in at least six days a week has surpassed 50 per cent. The rise of FB's valuation reflects the fact that it has a difficult problem ahead of it but all of the resources to solve it. The same cannot be said for its competitors Twitter and Google+.
According to Forbes, "Facebook stock turned a corner early in 2013 and has barely looked back. The stock is mainly responding to sharply rising ad revenue, especially in mobile. Facebook had 6% of worldwide digital ad revenue in 2013 (expected to rise to 7% in 2014) and 15% of worldwide mobile ad revenue (expected to rise to 22% in 2014.) Advertisers, in turn, are responding to the rising engagement stats that Facebook is claiming. Will Oremus of Slate interviewed Facebook's product management director for its newsfeed, Will Cathcart, who says the secret behind those gains is machine learning and lots and lots of user testing."
Facebook seem to know its consumer's need and it's getting better all the time. According to Stuff, Facebook feeds user's data into its targeted advertising, it works at least as hard at figuring out which of the user's friends' posts are most likely one want to see each time the app was opened. Advertisers may butter Facebook's bread, but its most pressing interest of all is in keeping its users coming back for more. If it ever fails at that, its advertising business will implode.
According to Forbes, FB's success is not really about addiction but the satisfying fulfilment of habit. The fact of being a habitual part of people's lives puts Facebook in stark contrast to Google+ which, despite the allocation of vast resources and brainpower has not transformed into that big a deal for the vast majority of Google's account holders and Facebook's changes to its newsfeed over the past few years have given it room to manoeuvre in ways unavailable to Twitter, its minimalist 140 character DNA now seeming quite restrictive.
Facebook's continuing experiment over what to show in user's News Feed has alternately enraged, annoyed and overwhelmed users but each move was calculated to create the opportunities Facebook is now exploiting.
Facebook has begun more carefully distinguishing between the likes that a post gets before users click on it and the ones it gets after they've clicked. A lot of people might be quick to hit the like button on a post based solely on a headline or teaser that panders to their political receptivity. But if very few of them go on to like or share the article after they've read it that might indicate to Facebook that the story didn't deliver.
According to Stuff, Facebook defines high-quality content not by any objective ranking system, but according to the tastes of its users. Each time users log in to Facebook, the site's algorithms have to choose from among an average of 1500 possible posts to place at the top of a user's news feed.
