{"id":10576,"date":"2014-10-09T12:19:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-09T17:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=10576"},"modified":"2025-11-30T14:49:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T19:49:19","slug":"a-tip-for-media-companies-facebook-isnt-your-enemy-but-its-not-your-friend-either-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/10\/09\/a-tip-for-media-companies-facebook-isnt-your-enemy-but-its-not-your-friend-either-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A tip for media companies: Facebook isn’t your enemy, but it’s not your friend either"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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There\u2019s been a lot of discussion in the media-sphere lately about the risks and rewards of Facebook for media companies and publishers of all kinds \u2014 a debate that was reignited at<\/a> the recent Online News Association conference, where former New York Times<\/em> social-media editor Liz Heron was put on the hot seat about Facebook\u2019s impenetrable algorithm and its effect on the news business. It was simultaneously an admission of the network\u2019s immense power and a revolt against the fundamental inscrutability of that power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frustration with that reality has been building for some time now, as media organizations have come to realize that social is the new search \u2014 and so they are now just as beholden to Twitter and Facebook as they once were to Google, and the new bosses are just as opaque as the old one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can see that frustration when people like NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen start trying to game the algorithm by\u00a0pretending that it\u2019s a personal update<\/a>\u00a0instead of a blog post, using words like \u201ccongratulations,\u201d etc. Or when Facebook product manager Mike Hudack writes about how the news business has turned to crap, and\u00a0is quickly besieged by<\/a>\u00a0media types who claim his company is to blame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Media companies have lost control<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Liz Heron told the ONA that trying to game the algorithm doesn\u2019t work, and that the only real secret to getting lots of interaction from Facebook for your content is to create and post great content<\/a> (this was always Google\u2019s argument as well). But what is great content? That\u2019s the existential problem media companies are wrestling with: is it clickbait that drives people to share<\/a>, or is it in-depth analysis of important topics? And how do we know when we are succeeding?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of what makes Facebook hard to figure out as a platform for news or content of any kind is that it\u2019s a moving target. John Herrman at The Awl\u00a0looked at the top publishers on Facebook<\/a>\u00a0as ranked by Newswhip, which tracks the most-shared content, and \u2014 depending on how you look at the future of online media \u2014 the results were more than a little depressing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While BuzzFeed and its viral content have been seen for some time as the king of Facebook sharing, Newswhip results show that it has been eclipsed by a BuzzFeed clone called PlayBuzz, a site founded by the son<\/a> of the former Israeli prime minister that relies heavily on user-generated content, and especially quizzes. In a recent month, according to The Awl post, nine out of the top 10 most-shared posts consisted of either quizzes or fake news reports. As Herrman put it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What can Publishers Learn From This? A literal interpretation: SUBLIMATE YOUR IDENTITY ENTIRELY, EVERY MONTH, because nothing else works, and the next PlayBuzz or Viral Nova could appear tomorrow and just totally house you out of nowhere.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In a post responding to some of the fears expressed at the ONA meeting and elsewhere about Facebook\u2019s control, David Higgerson \u2014 digital publishing director at Trinity Mirror in the UK \u2014\u00a0wrote a post arguing that media companies<\/a>\u00a0need to \u201cget over their fear\u201d of the social network and figure out how to use it to broaden their reach and engage with new audiences in new ways. \u201cOur job as journalists is to be part of that community and give people the content they want,\u201d he said.ournalists is to be part of that community and give people the content they want,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not your friend, it\u2019s just a tool<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Higgerson is right, of course. If you believe in the principle that former Reuters blogger Felix Salmon and his new boss at Fusion, Margarita Noriega, have described as “promiscuous media”<\/a> — the idea that content, including journalism, needs to be created and published and distributed through multiple platforms and services if it is to be effective — then ignoring Facebook is unwise, and possibly even fatal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti made a good point in a response to Higgerson’s argument, however, which is that by giving content to Facebook you are ultimately helping Facebook<\/a> as much or more than you are helping yourself. How much value are they getting out of that relationship and how much of that is value that you could or should be capturing yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom line is that Facebook is a corporation that ultimately has its own interests at heart, not those of the media industry or the journalistic community. To the extent that news organizations generate content that improves engagement on Facebook or generates data the company can use, then it will promote that content<\/a>. If that stops working, then it will hide or down-rank that content without a moment’s hesitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s no better example of the dual nature of Facebook than the “social reader” experiments of 2012, when newspapers like The Guardian<\/em> and the Washington Post<\/em> created Facebook apps that allowed users to read their news on the site. At first, those apps generated huge increases in traffic — until Facebook changed its mind<\/a> about promoting them, at which point they fell off the edge of the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facebook may be cozying up to journalists<\/a> and news organizations, because it sees their content as having value in attracting and keeping readers, but that is its only purpose. And anyone doing business with the network should keep that in mind at all times, just as the frog should have kept the scorpion’s<\/a> true nature in mind in the old fable. Ultimately, it is a tool — one that can cut both ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock \/ Aaron Amat<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s been a lot of discussion in the media-sphere lately about the risks and rewards of Facebook for media companies and publishers of all kinds \u2014 a debate that was reignited at the recent Online News Association conference, where former New York Times social-media editor Liz Heron was put on the hot seat about Facebook\u2019s impenetrable algorithm and its … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A tip for media companies: Facebook isn’t your enemy, but it’s not your friend either”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282462,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10576\/revisions\/282462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}