An Ongoing Struggle to Make Facebook Great Again
In one of the most unselfish moves on the Internet, Mark Zuckerberg is moving the attention away from publishers and brands on Facebook, and redirecting it to human beings.
This decision may not stick, due to the stock price dropping over eight points by the end of Friday, January 12. If it does hold, our publishing company is properly setup for success.
In 2013 and 2014 we did some advertising on Facebook. It did provide some brand awareness, but when we started seeing people get caught up in likes and shares by fake users, we saw the writing on the wall. That message was loud and clear, ‘do not pay for fake followers and user engagement.’
The main objective with our company is to bridge cultural gaps with the use of different forms of media.
When robots on Instagram and Facebook tag a friend, leave little to nothing useful in the comment section, and like or share a post; it does little value to society. Some people make the argument that it detracts from society.
Foresight with Web Publishing
It could be seen that people that are clairvoyant are odd, but it is not that hard to see patterns, user engagement, historic data, and start to connect ideas that allow someone to see into the future.
This move by Mark Zuckerberg may not be popular with publishing companies that have heavily invested in Facebook. That being said, Facebook has had a problem with brands and publishing companies providing fake news to their user base. It will hopefully overall draw people back in for a more honest user experience.
My suggestion to publishing companies, ‘double down.’ I want you to go out of business trying to squeeze attention out of the Facebook platform. Double your spending, double your time, and double your debt trying to create growth with an company that has peaked. Stop investing in smaller companies that understand large-scale trends. Blindly trust that your numbers will re-emerge like the Titanic.
On one hand, I would like other media companies to focus on bridging cultural gaps as well, but a lot of them are financially driven.
The Future of Facebook
The algorithm at Facebook constantly is changing, and if the board of directors see the stock continue to dip, the plans to pull back publishers may slowly change over time.
I have a method to save Facebook, and it involves a paid service model similar to YouTube Red.
- My first goal would be to openly allow users to continue their free service of Facebook.
- The first tier for paid service would provide an ad free user experience.
- The second would allow users to have no ads, as well as streaming music and video. Facebook would need to purchase rights to stream media on their platform.
- The third tier would allow no ads, streaming music and video, as well as a filter. This filter would give users the ability to switch back and forth to any layout and functionality from all the different years of Facebook’s history. If you enjoyed only having college-related emails see your content, go ahead. Users on this tier would also get all of the posts from the pages they like, as well as posts from friends and family filtered into categories. I would have it where users would see four tabs on the left or the right side. One tab would be for posts from friends, one for family, one for pages, and one for interests. The user would be able to control and enlarge the post that they want to interact with, in addition to it being posted to their main wall.
This model would make up for lost revenue that is projected with the upcoming algorithm, as well as give everyone want they want, more control over Facebook.
