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That’s what this opinion piece for Entrepreneur Magazine argues.
The writer claims that because the amount of sharing is doubling every year, there is now so much information out there that people can’t cope. And Facebook’s algorithms cannot adjust.
Every time someone logs into Facebook, there are an average of 1,500 pieces of content that they “could” see, were Facebook to reveal everything that all of that person’s friends are doing. This is growing, and the figure doesn’t include ads.
Last I heard from Google, they are crawling over a trillion pages every day. When I first started working at Yahoo! a dozen years ago, we were looking at perhaps a hundred million web pages.
Do you find Google overwhelming because they will return 167 million results for “Facebook Marketing Expert”?
Do you think that Mari Smith, who is ranking #1 on Google for this search, is worried about the other 166,999,999,999 folks?
And if you grow from having just 50 friends on Facebook to 500, does it mean that the acquaintances will drown out your close friends and family?
Silly.
The author doesn’t understand that the purpose of a newsfeed algorithm is to show you what matters most to you, based on who you’ve interacted the most with, what content you enjoy, and how often you wish to consumer content.
In fact, the more information Facebook has, the more they know about you and the smarter they can be in personalization.
YOU CAN HAVE ONLY SO MANY GOOD FRIENDS
If you take a pizza of 8 normal slices, then cut each slice in half, you have 16 slices. Do it again and you have 32 slices. But there is still the same amount of pizza.
Facebook doesn’t enable you to have more close friends, arguably. Nor do they require that you discard your good friends to fritter away time on acquaintances. They don’t show casual friend updates with the same frequency.
Likewise, with Facebook having a greater pool of status updates to select from doesn’t mean you have to spend more time on Facebook. However, the author did calculate that it would take you 17 hours per day to consume all the content available to you.
THE SKY IS FALLING
It’s fashionable to decry Facebook– too many ads, all the kids are abandoning, your privacy is gone, or whatever sensationalization generates press.
But the smart money is on Facebook ads and doesn’t fall for it.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.