3 News That Rocked Facebook This Week

Facebook has been a legitimate and reliable source of news for years now. It’s effectively delivered news to users in an unprecedented way. Although, this convention threatens the business of news organizations because people are no longer going to their websites anymore, there’s no stopping publishers to continue promoting their contents on the popular social network platform.

The Facebook algorithm that determines what appears in news feeds also favours content hosted natively—meaning it’s in the interests of people looking for exposure to upload their content to Facebook directly. But it’s the product of a concerted push by Facebook to encourage content creators to publish or share contents to the platform natively.

We’re still halfway through the week, might be too early for a rundown of the most explosive news we’ve heard this week, but the following news are too good to be skipped. Here’s the 3 news that definitely rocked the social network this week.

Hillary Clinton is crushing Jeb Bush on Facebook

It’s presidential campaign launch season, and Facebook has tracked reactions to each candidate’s official announcement since Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) became the first major candidate to jump into the race in March.

The figures include all interactions (likes, posts, comments, shares), positive or negative. They’re less an indication of how popular someone is than of how much interest there is in them, from either side. With numbers now in for Jeb Bush’s announcement, Hillary Clinton is far, far ahead:

 

 

In the 24 hours surrounding Clinton’s announcement on April 12, 4.7 million people produced 10.1 million interactions on Facebook. Cruz is a very distant second, with 2.1 million people creating 5.5 million interactions, about half of Hillary’s performance. Here’s a chart showing the number of interactions for each candidate, rather than the number of people interacting about each:

Hillary’s dominance makes sense. She’s by far the best-known candidate nationally, in either party, and is among the most admired women in the entire world. She faces many fewer, and much less potent, primary opponents than any Republican candidate, meaning the base isn’t as fractured and more Democratic voters are likely to like and share posts about her. She also had a very social media-centric announcement, eschewing a big rally in favor of a video posted on YouTube and (yes) Facebook:

But the Republican results, particularly Bush’s, are interesting. Jeb didn’t embarrass himself by doing as poorly as, say, Martin O’Malley or George Pataki, but he was bested by GOP rivals both serious (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul) and not (Cruz, Ben Carson), as well as by Bernie Sanders. He wasn’t too far ahead of retreads like Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry — even though his last name means he’s better known than any other candidate besides Hillary.

 

The number of people liking, commenting, posting, and sharing in the 24 hours around an initial campaign announcement isn’t likely to tell you much about who’s going to win in the end. But it does tell you a little bit about the degree of public interest (again, positive or negative) at the campaign’s outset. And it doesn’t look like people care all too much about Jeb.

Thanks to Andy Stone at Facebook for the data.

Content that is interesting, unique and of high-quality will arouse strong feelings within its audience. Much more if it directly concerns them, they’ll love it even more.

Out of politics, here’s a horrifying news out of Missouri.

Horrifying Facebook posts lead police to Missouri woman’s brutal murder, daughter’s mysterious disappearance

Two horrifying posts on a Facebook account shared by a Missouri mother and her disabled daughter led police to discover the mom brutally killed in her Springfield home.

 

The teenage daughter, meanwhile, was mysteriously found in Wisconsin the next day with a man authorities have only identified as “a person of interest.”

 

The bizarre case started Sunday afternoon when friends noticed an alarming message on a Facebook account shared by Clauddinnea “Dee Dee” Blancharde, 48, and her 19-year-old daughter, Gypsy Blancharde.

It read: “That Bitch is Dead!”

An hour later, the poster wrote in a comment under the status: “I f—en SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER…HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO F—EN LOUD LOL.”

 

Friends initially responded with a flurry of fearful messages. “Should someone notify the local police??? This sounds scary,” one wrote. Some suggested the account got hacked. Finally, a few went to check on the family, and got no answer at their home.

 

 When police arrived, they found Dee Dee “deceased of a violent nature,” theSpringfield News-Leader reported.

Authorities did not believe it to be a random attack, and thought Dee Dee might have been dead for up to 24 hours before she was found, KOLR reported.

 

Gypsy — who is wheelchair-bound because of leukemia and muscular dystrophy, according to neighbors — was considered missing until Monday morning, when she turned up unharmed with an unidentified man in Big Bend, Wis. The 25-year-old man was arrested, but police are not yet calling him a suspect. They also are not ruling out Gypsy as a suspect.

 

The stepfather of the man found with Gypsy told WREX the two were dating online, and said the man recently visited Missouri to bring Gypsy to Wisconsin.

 

Police have not yet determined how Dee Dee was murdered, how her daughter ended up in Wisconsin and how much of the vile Facebook comment is true.

Almost every week we hear major news out of our most revered tech companies, and this week didn’t fail. Much has been said about Oculus, but this week the exchange of words among stakeholders has gone a little notch higher.

Unlucky, Palmer: Facebook’s going to BAN Oculus pr0n apps

Virtual muck now struck from smut bucket content glut despite Luckey’s pluck

Facebook has contradicted a statement by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and declared that pornographic content will be forbidden from appearing on the Oculus store.

 

Speaking at Silicon Valley’s Virtual Reality Conference in San Jose, in May, 22-year old Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was asked whether his company would be blocking adult content on its headsets.

 

Luckey said the company will allow pornography on its VR buckets because Oculus is committed to creating an open platform.

 

However, Business Insider reported the new details about the Rift that were released on Thursday, which appears to contradict this.

 

The report suggests that Oculus will run its own app store similar to Apple’s app store, which is the only means of getting mobile apps onto iOS devices.

 

Oculus would therefore not be an open platform, and Facebook has said it would use its control to “vet the apps that appear in its store, and even rate the apps” according to the report.

 

However, virtual reality sex games will not be a part of that.

 

“Oculus only distributes developer content that meets its terms of service, which forbids pornographic content from being a part of the Oculus Store,” a spokesman told Business Insider.

 

Business Insider then asked, whether in Oculus’ efforts to produce a family-friendly headbucket, it would also be banning violent content too.

 

“Oculus only distributes developer content that meets their terms of service, but it isn’t open to discuss what those terms are at this time,” came the exceedingly American reply.

 

The digi-goggles will ship to customers in 2016. ®

Credits: Featured Image

Weekend Rundown: News You Should Know From Facebook

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most recent change to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm considers the measure of time users spend seeing stories. The change was made in recognition that users don’t essentially like, comment nor share each story that is critical to them.

The change to the News Feed algorithm will take off “over the advancing weeks,” and will not essentially affect the pages.

The following outlines the sheer indication of Facebook’s announcement as reported by Mashable’s JP Mangalindan about this recent change on the popular social network.

Facebook News Feed changes again: Now it’s all about time spent reading

Facebook revealed on Friday that it has tweaked the stream of information you get on the service once again — this time to factor in the amount of time you spend looking at a post.

 

Previously, how high or low a post showed up in your News Feed — or if it showed up at all — depended on how much your Facebook friends liked, commented on, or shared it. But no longer.

 

“It’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story,” wrote Facebook software engineer Ansha Yu in a company blog post Friday. “Some people may spend 10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10 seconds on a story because they have a slow Internet connection.”

 

The solution? “We’ve discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them,” Yu added.

 

So if you spend a lot of time glancing over a News Feed post with photos from your sister’s wedding, say, Facebook now notices that, factors in how long the post is on your screen, and places any other photo-based posts from your sister higher up in your News Feed.

 

The aim is to make the News Feed more compelling and interesting for users and ultimately boost overall time spent on the social network — by treating time spent on a post as another measure of interaction. How often do you check out your News Feed, and linger on an interesting post without liking, commenting or sharing it?

 

This is also the latest in a long series of News Feed tweaks Facebook makes for accuracy and relevance. This April, for example, the social network announced it had adjusted the News Feed algorithm to emphasize updates from friends versus content from Pages.

 

Later that month, it updated the algorithm again, this time to downplay posts highlighting what a friend Liked or commented — they either show up lower in your News Feed or don’t show up at all.

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm now factors in how much time you’ve spent looking at a post, on top of whether you’ve Liked, commented on or shared it.

Facebook also rolled out this week a new feature that will collect pertinent information about a company or a place like posts from the company’s page, upcoming events, check-ins, etc. and place it at the top of news feed.

Facebook Place Tips: This Week in Social Media

What’s New This Week

Facebook Introduces Place Tips for Business Pages: “Place Tips gather useful information about a business or landmark (like posts from the business’ Page, upcoming events and friends’ recommendations and check-ins) and show it at the top of News Feed to in-store visitors.”

 

 

Facebook Rolls Out Facebook Lite: Facebook Lite is “a new version of Facebook for Android that uses less data and works well across all network conditions.”

 

Publishing on social media can be daunting at times. It requires focus, wisdom and dedication. If you haven’t established a system that lessens the gravity of difficulty in producing social media contents, now is the time to learn it all.

Tom Van Buren, a contributor at ProBlogger.net writes a feature that outlines how advance scheduling can do wonder in our social media marketing programs, and teaches us how exactly to use it.

3 Steps to Saving Time by Writing Social Media Updates in Batches

Scheduling updates in advance solves a number of social media’s most frustrating problems. It gives your routine newfound flexibility, and it can even make you a better blogger. But there’s one hurdle that scheduling alone doesn’t take care of for you: those updates still have to come from somewhere, and that means you have to write them.

 

Part of the appeal of scheduling is that it stops social media from interrupting your life every time you want to post an update, but without a sound strategy for actually writing those updates, you might just be trading one type of frustration for another. This post will show you how to write social media updates by the batch, so you can more easily grow your fanbase and drive more reliable traffic to your blog.

 

Think about more than just your own traffic

Social media is an invaluable resource for driving traffic to your own website, but getting carried away can do more harm than good. Forty-five percent of users cite excessive self-promotion as a reason why they would unfollow a brand on social, which means your strategy has to be a lot more refined than just sharing your own links.

 

Break down your typical updates into categories by type, so there’s variety to the content you share. In addition to posting links to your own blog posts, for example, you might also use social media for posting tips, linking to useful content on other websites, sharing inspirational or funny quotes, and so on. (Quotes and tips in particular are useful for getting shares, which can help you grow your audience.) These categories will guide you through the next step of the batching process: actually writing your updates.

 

Save time by writing in blocks

If you regularly schedule your social media updates, you might already be writing them in batches – just very small ones. For example, you might set aside time every morning to write and schedule your updates for that day. While this works in theory, it prevents you from developing a big-picture strategy, and it isn’t saving you as much time as it could.

 

Use the categories you defined to write as many updates you can within a certain time frame (much like the longstanding Pomodoro Technique suggests). Take 20 minutes to write as many updates as you can promoting your various blog posts, then another 20 for tips, and so on. Writing as much as you can within a certain time period gives you the ammunition with which to load your schedule, and it helps you build and maintain creative momentum as you go.

 

Writing bigger batches like this may seem like a major time commitment, but think of it like making a weekly trip to the grocery store instead of going every day. It may feel like you’re spending more time at the store, but for as long as the groceries last, you’re not wasting time on things like planning meals, making your list, driving back and forth, unloading the car, and so on. Once the work is done, it’s done.

 

The amount of time these updates last will vary depending on how often you post, but there’s one final step you should take to make sure that you get as much out of them as possible.

Image credit: Featured Image, Facebook Place, Facebook Lite