Mark Zuckerberg’s Latest Manifesto Shows How to Admit Failure, Then Frame It

In his latest blog post, Mark Zuckerberg made a major announcement. As the New York Times put it, the Facebook CEO “expressed his intentions to change the essential nature of social media.”

Given such change, Zuckerberg knew that many people would be skeptical, even antagonistic. Yet instead of shying away from this controversy, he faced it head-on, and then framed his interpretation in a favorable light:

“Frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy-protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”

Such candor is courageous — and smart.

How Facebook Perfected Its Ad-Targeting Machine by Jonathan Rick

How Facebook Conquered Mobile

Is Facebook Dying?

“Here’s the hard truth. According to the latest from Pew Research, Facebook’s growth has become relatively stagnant. The site is also losing enthusiasm from today’s adolescents.

“But, I, as well as others, will argue that’s completely irrelevant. Facebook is still the world’s largest social network. The latest data shows that Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion monthly active users. That means 20% of the world is on Facebook.

“Reports released just days ago show that Facebook topped Wall Street’s revenue target in the fourth quarter, growing by 49% and reaching $3.85 billion.

“So yeah. Facebook’s not going anywhere.

—Kiera Stein

Everybody Needs a Cash Cow

Updated in 2020.

Company	Cash Cow	Percentage of Revenue
Bloomberg	Terminals	85%
Google	Ads	85%
Facebook	Ads	98%

Addendum (7/15/2019):

Humira accounts for 60% of AbbVie’s sales.

When Facebook Ignores Your Like

Will Oremus:

Facebook has begun more carefully differentiating between the likes that a post gets before users click on it and the ones it gets after they’ve clicked. A lot of people might be quick to hit the like button on a post based solely on a headline or teaser that panders to their political sensibilities. But if very few of them go on to like or share the article after they’ve read it, that might indicate to Facebook that the story didn’t deliver.

How Facebook Knows What You Like Even When You Don’t Click the “Like” Button

When users click on a link in their news feed, Facebook looks very carefully at what happens next. Says Will Cathcart, who oversees the product management teams that work on the company’s news feed:

“If you’re someone who, every time you see an article from the New York Times, you not only click on it, but go offsite and stay offsite for a while before you come back, we can probably infer that you in particular find articles from the New York Times more relevant”—even if you don’t actually hit “like” on them.

The #1 Rule of the Internet: Never Underestimate Facebook

Henry Blodget:

The names of all the smart people who pronounced Facebook itself a “fad” or “worthless” and dissed every new investment in the company as “moronic” could fill a book. Most people have consistently underestimated the power, growth potential, and value of the leading social platforms, including Facebook. Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, for example, which was then a revenueless company with 13 employees, was seen as proof that Mark Zuckerberg was a clueless kid who had no business running a major company. Meanwhile, Facebook is now valued at $175 billion, and Instagram is considered one of the smartest preemptive acquisitions in history. $19 billion for WhatsApp is a much bolder bet than Instagram, but it, too, could end up looking a lot smarter than most people think.

Is Facebook the Perfect Platform to Engage Customers?

HubSpot says “yes”:

If you are comfortable with talking to your customers, you’ll find a lot to like on Facebook ...

This time you invest in learning more about Facebook marketing will help you generate more traffic to your website, more sales, higher average sales, and more and better ways to connect with your customers. It will also provide your customers and prospects more ways to learn about your offerings even as they tell you what it is they want from your business.

Perhaps most important is that metric you cannot measure: the level of engagement and loyalty to your brand that social networks and only inbound marketing can generate on a mass scale ...

Facebook has already done the heavy lifting. They’ve got your audience tuned in every day because it’s become a part of the fabric of people’s lives ... From a marketer’s perspective, this is a dream come true. You get to have a two-way relationship with your best customers and their family and friends.

Is Facebook’s Success Largely a Product of Luck?

The New York Times:

Given that Facebook had virtually no mobile presence in 2012, [its mobile-first] transition is a huge turn that now puts the company at the forefront of the industry’s shift to serving people on the move.

The company deserves much of the credit for making that switch, said Nate Elliott, an industry analyst at Forrester Research. It revamped its once-clunky mobile apps and introduced better targeting.

But he said the company’s principal ad format—messages inserted among the stream of status updates and photos that users share with one another—became mobile largely because that was how users chose to reach their news feeds.

“Their users changed their behavior,” he said. “That was pretty much a stroke of luck.”

Why the New Republic Gets an F in Social Media, in 4 Screen Shots

The headline (nice):

The social-media call to action (so far, so good):

What happens when you click “facebook” (not so good):



What happens when you click “twitter” (double fail):



Related: Don’t Let This Happen to Your Facebook Page

If You Want Your Content to Go Viral, There Are Really Only Two Social Networks That Matter

Facebook: Almost all your traffic will come from Facebook.

Reddit: Good luck. If you crack it, you are a God.

Tumblr: Slow cook it to perfection.

Twitter: If you do it right, it can make a dent.

—Upworthy

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“The traffic potential of the social web is far beyond what most media sites recognize. We all might think we understand Facebook and Twitter’s power to drive traffic. But it turns out that when you actually create content specifically meant for those networks—particularly Facebook—they drive vastly more traffic than ever seemed possible.”

—Ezra Klein

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Addendum (2/24/2014):

“[People] talk about ‘social media’ and ‘sharing’ generally, but specifically it is as much about gaming Facebook as SEO was about gaming Google.”

—Alex Pareene

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Addendum (11/4/2014):

“Search from Google still creates inbound interest, and Twitter can spark attention, especially among media types, but when it comes to sheer tonnage of eyeballs, nothing rivals Facebook.”

—David Carr

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Addendum (12/30/2014):

“A story’s shareability is now largely determined by its shareability on Facebook.”

—Alexis Madrigal

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“Facebook should be 80% of your effort, if you’re focussed on social media.”

—Emerson Spartz

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Addendum (2/20/2015):

“Every good media organization knows that the road to traffic leads through Facebook rather than Twitter ... Twitter is worthless for the limited purpose of driving traffic to your website, because Twitter is not a portal for outbound links, but rather a homepage for self-contained pictures and observations.”

—Derek Thompson

Facebook Is a Black Box

Ezra Klein finds the words to articulate what a Facebook sales rep once told me: so often does the company tweak its product that even she has difficulty staying abreast of the dizzying number of changes:

The algorithm powering Facebook’s news feed ... is a black box. No one outside the company knows exactly how it works. Facebook is constantly testing, tweaking, and reworking to ensure that the content users see is the content that keeps them coming back.

A few years back, for instance, it was known in the media that the algorithm penalized news organizations that posted more than three or four times a day. Then Facebook changed its mind: Now news organizations can post 10 or 20 times a day before taking a hit.

An example: on Facebook, you’d think that posting a 960x960 picture is your best bet. But as Upworthy found—at least as of July—simply posting a link and letting Facebook extract the picture yields more clickthroughs. (Photos get more likes and shares, but it’s not enough to make up for the lower number of clicks.)

Don’t Let This Happen to Your Facebook Page

Upworthy: 10 Ways to Win the Internets

Addendum (1/1/2014): Another example, as explained by Sonya Song:

As a not quite positive example, MIT Technology Review may show us how to gain little attention. Look at its Facebook page, we can see a lot of big T’s, certainly the logo of the magazine. It’s quite obvious that the stories are shared as links and the logo is automatically extracted by Facebook. As such, these stories have failed to have an interesting or simply relevant visual companion. The repeated T’s may also have turned the fans blind toward this symbol. The sad situation is that, even though the Review generates a lot of thrilling stories, its Facebook presence is far from compelling.

Why “Mobile-First” Should Be Your Default Philosophy

If it's important enough for the world's biggest social network, it's important enough for you:

[Facebook's new] apps are part of what Facebook executives say is a transformation into a “mobile first” company. Developing mobile products has been made a priority, they said in recent interviews, and every team inside the company has been reorganized with the goal of inserting mobile into its DNA.

“We have basically retooled and focused the company around mobile,” said Mike Schroepfer, vice president for engineering of Facebook. “It’s been a huge change.”

As part of the reformation, product teams have been arranged so that they now make mobile versions of new features at the same time that they are developed for the main Web site. Before, the company would make new features for the Web site, then a core mobile team would follow up with translations for mobile devices.

Facebook is also trying to spread mobile expertise throughout the company. Its top engineers hold training sessions every week for 20 employees at a time, teaching them how to program for Apple and Android devices. About 100 engineers are now working on Facebook’s mobile products, according to Cory Ondrejka, chief of mobile engineering.

With the training, the company expects to have created 200 new mobile engineers by the end of the year, Mr. Schroepfer said. Soon these classes will be open to any Facebook employee who wants to come, including those from areas like marketing and design.

The Problem With the “Like” Button

A recent article in the Register (United Kingdom) posed the following hypothetical:

“If a friend posts a newspaper article to Facebook about a government minister who’s been caught embezzling millions, does a like mean ‘I like it when government ministers embezzle millions,’ or does it mean ‘I like it when government ministers who’ve embezzled millions are exposed in newspaper articles’?

This conundrum reminded me of something I tweeted a week earlier:

If a friend announces bad news on Facebook, should you click the "like" button?
— Jonathan Rick (@jrick) December 18, 2012

Specifically, let’s say your sister’s cat just died. On Facebook, she writes, “RIP, Corey Sue (1998-2012).” How should you respond?

My two sense: When a “like” can be construed to contain opposite meanings, leave a comment. Instead of clicking, try typing. That is, scroll past the thumbs-up button and move your cursor to the field where you can more fully express yourself. A few words (“My condolences, Jen”) mean far more—to both your sister and Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm—than a facile flick of your finger.

On Twitter, you’ll often see in someone’s bio that “RTs ≠ endorsements.” This means that because you retweet something doesn’t mean you’re endorsing it. Let’s make the Facebook corollary: “likes ≠ endorsements.”