Thursday, December 1, 2011

What is Wrong with Social Media

I am writing this because there was a nice opportunity for Facebook to show that Viral is real and that people Share. But they blew it. And I wonder if the reason is because the reality would tarnish the view of Social prior to their coming IPO.

Yahoo News had this article:


They gave a few numbers. The top two were shared almost 600,000 times. Not bad. But I bet there were 79million stories (articles) in 2011 and with 800 million users 600k as number one was shared by 0.075% of their user base.

And when I look at Shares on Social this is incremental views for media. Meaning the majority of their readers will not come from Social and a prime website for news needs a few million readers per day. So this proves that from Facebook at least a prime news property will maybe get a boost of thousands of readers. Not enough to move any advertising dollar needles. In fact whenever I look at the LIKE button shares for major news sites rarely does that number exceed a few thousand and normally is in the hundreds.

What is worse is Facebook published this list and gave NO SHARE COUNTS! Why is that Facebook?


And that is what is wrong with Social Media. All fluff and no substance. This was hyped by Facebook. Yahoo picked it up. And it has ZERO MEANING TO ANYONE! It tells me nothing really about whether or not I should view Facebook as a platform that shares content enough for me to include it in any marketing strategies other than buying Facebook Ads. And this to me is further proof that Facebook really is just a big Display Ad network no different than Yahoo.

And the icing on the cake? This post by Facebook has 892 Likes and only 1392 Shares. VIRAL? I think not. Sharing even? I think not. People do not share on Facebook. They just post and read. And that is the a fact.

BTW please share this on the Twitter ;-)

2 comments:

  1. You just have a hate goin' on w/ FB and now you are sorry you dropped out.

    The numbers are pretty telling, but still there has to be a way to harness those numbers. The potential and opportunity is there even if some are making it out to be bigger than it really is.

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  2. I agree with you Bill. I just think we view Facebook in the wrong way. And really surprised they didn't include numbers. If Yahoo hadn't published the number one and two numbers I would have guessed much higher. And they didn't include clicks on the links. One thing to share another to take action and read.

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