Facebook: for personal content, or commercial professional
In the past few months, Facebook has quietly shifted into crisis mode. According to The Information, "original broadcast sharing"--i.e., posts consisting of users' own words and images--fell 21 percent from 2014 to 2015, contributing to a 5.5 percent decrease in total sharing. In response, the company created a task force in London whose mission is to devise a strategy to stem the ebb and get people sharing again. Among the measures taken so far: a change in the News Feed algorithm that privileges original status updates over professional content like news links and viral videos, and Wednesday's mishap-marred rollout of a new live-video-streaming feature.
It's a stunning reversal of fortune for Facebook, whose strategic emphasis for the past few years has been on getting media companies and celebrities to put more of their premium content on Facebook. The better (read: more professional) the quality of what's in your News Feed, the more advertisers would pay to be next to it, went the thinking.