Even after all the scandals starred by the most powerful social network of our time, people keep going to Facebook to catch up on our daily news from our friends and the world, we still have freedom to take anywone’s content and share it or post it in our timeline so that our followers can see it too, or at least it’s been like that so far.
No more share button
Facebook is on a massive tidal wave of changes that came after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Zuckerberg himself claims to be looking to go back to the social idea that gave birth to the platform, as well as to give the users more control over what they post and share, and what they don’t want to post or share.
Trying to prioritize direct messaging, Facebook has started to test changing the “share” button for a “message” button. This is hoping, and based on their own data, that users feel their data is “less public”, since users now want to be more selective with their data and posts.
Coup de grâce on organic posts
Let´s analyze. Is really direct messaging more popular than sharing? Many people today have decided to migrate to Instagram, considering the media is more immediate, more authentic and, most importantly, it lack the amount of “garbage” Facebook has. Realistically, the “change in algorithm” that came so we could whatch por posts from our friends didn’t exactly work the same for everybody, between that and the ads on videos, feed and messaging, the audience got fed up really quick.
What does this have to do with the new messaging option? Simple, each day many more users go to Instagram, where, anytime we are browsing on our feed or in the discovery section and we want to share something on the same app, we can only do it on direct messaging with our contacts or through external apps that help us repost, (many times by kidnapping our account to like posts that have nothing to do with us). Maybe that’s what they mean when talking about the popularity of direct messaging.
We had this idea that each social network had its own purpose and objective, but it looks like Facebook keeps forgetting it’s not Instagram and the metamorphosis keeps blurring the lines between each social network. If we can’t share our contacts posts on Facebook, then where?
The thin line between public and private
As we already mentioned, social media genesis was always about sharing, getting informed and commenting, I see a post, I like it, I share it and my contacts comment like somekind of an open forum in which the user could be heard and marketing could measure interest over certain topic or product. If we are not able to share publicly what calls our attention, where will the network go?
Would someone please think about organics? Maybe this could be the opportunity for a renaissance of creator content and the birth of new styles of storytelling. However, if what really counts at the end of the day is impacts, then we can kiss goodbye the little organic material that still survives on our billions of monthly feeds.
Sources
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.everyupdates.in
www.trafficjammedia.co