Social Networks like Facebook don’t really exist solely because they want you to be social. In reality the money they make comes from the targeted advertising that they can sell based on all of the personal information we all happily post day in and day out. So all of that personal information is beneficial to the bottom line of the world’s biggest social network. There’s a bit of a problem though: We aren’t sharing anywhere near as much personal content on Facebook anymore, and they’d really like it if we could start doing that again.
Sharing overall isn’t down by any means, more people are using the service than ever. But Facebook has seen a 21% drop year over year as of mid-2015 of the types of posts that are real moneymakers for them. Stuff like “I just bought my favorite new sweater from The Store, I really love The Store and would love to see Facebook’s targeted advertising for The Store” has been getting replaced by posts from other sources. Think animated gif/short video recipes and that sort of thing.
Facebook isn’t taking this shift in sharing habits lying down. Quite the opposite. They’ve got an entire team dedicated to working out ways to convince users to share more “original content” and to stop what they’re calling “context collapse.” Stuff like the increased focus with “On This Day” posts, or the newly rolled out live video feeds are just a few of the ways they’re hoping to increase the type of sharing that makes them money.
Of course publicly, Facebook isn’t sounding the alarm quite yet… with a spokesman telling TechCrunch:
People continue to share a ton of Facebook; the overall level of sharing has remained not only strong, but similar to levels in prior years.
The Social Media giant doesn’t seem to be too desperate quite yet, but we’ll wait and see how their tactics change if there is a continued drop in original content sharing in the future.
Have you been sharing less personal content on Facebook recently? Let us know what you think in either the comment section or hey, maybe on a social media site like Facebook! Google+ or Twitter would work too though.
[button link=”https://www.theinformation.com/facebook-struggles-to-stop-decline-in-original-sharing” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: The Information[/button][button link=”http://www.techtimes.com/articles/148829/20160409/decline-in-original-sharing-worries-facebook-heres-whats-happening.htm” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Via: Tech Times[/button]
