It turns out my Facebook experience isn’t that unusual. More and more people are excising personal stories from their Facebook experience, even as they continue to Like others’ posts and share news and information from other websites. What’s more, it seems brands are at least partly to blame.
Facebook reports that original sharing of personal stories declined 21 percent year-over-year as of mid-2015, according to technology media site The Information. However, overall sharing levels have stayed strong. Facebook’s 1.6 billion users continue to share content—but it’s content generated from other websites, not their own personal stories.
The Intimacy Gap
Facebook began as a way to share intimate stuff with a select audience—photos, random thoughts, personal milestones. But as Facebook enters its second decade of existence, users have tallied up hundreds of friends from different areas of life. Users may not want to post pics from last night’s bar crawl knowing they’ll be seen by their grandma or former boss.
According to The Information, Facebook employees working on the problem call this decay in intimacy “context collapse.” Personal sharing hasn’t gone away, but it’s shifted to smaller audiences on platforms like Snapchat or Instagram. The smaller and more intimate the audience, the more personal the sharing, apparently.
Part of the trend is Facebook’s own doing. The company has been plagued by controversies about its privacy policies and its use of personal data, and people still periodically post fake “privacy” notices trying to protect personal information, even if such notices are hoaxes.
At the same time, the proliferation of content from publishers and brands have given users access to a wealth of content without leaving the site (and companies access to a wealth of user data). And while it’s fun to share insightful articles or hilarious memes, at some point, Facebook morphed from a personal sharing network to a sort of viral content recommendation machine. A user’s Facebook News Feed became a content black hole; a place for distractions courtesy of publishers or brands, not personal sharing.
The content vortex shows no signs of slowing down. Facebook recently opened the floodgates for more branded content from publishers and influencers, who were previously prohibited from posting about a brand unless it was part of a paid ad campaign, Ad Age reported.
“Our goal here is to make ads as interesting and useful as your friends’ content on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said in 2014. In retrospect, that strategy might have been a bit too effective.
Making Facebook Personal AgainFacebook’s transition to a content hub is a big problem for the social network. Facebook built an empire on being the only place where you could easily keep up with the people you care about. Personal stories are still a big reason why people come back to the network every day. Once Facebook loses that advantage, it loses its audience.
Facebook also loses data when users refuse to share personal info. Facebook makes money by selling targeted advertising and sponsored content opportunities. Less personal data means less effective advertising.
To combat the problem, Facebook is trying different ways of getting people to post more. The “On This Day” feature reminds people of past memories that users might want to talk about again. Personal updates are now more prominent in News Feed, and Facebook has made it easier to share your own stories, according to The Information. Users now get more aggressive reminders to wish friends a happy birthday, a classic Facebook interaction, The Washington Post reported. Other features include prompts to encourage people to post about ongoing events, like holidays or news stories, The Wall Street Journal noted.
The debut of live video for all users is yet another tactic to increase sharing—in addition to competing with more intimate messaging apps like Snapchat. Users can “go live” with people in specific groups (e.g. just your closest friends and family) or people connected with a specific event. “We hope this new ability to both broadcast and watch live video within Groups and Events enables people to connect more deeply with their closest friends, family, and the communities of people who share their interests,” the company said.
Facebook needs these initiatives to work in order to get users away from lurking on the site and back to posting again. Facebook can survive on content for a while, but eventually, users will leave when they realize they can get the same content elsewhere.
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