Facebook follies

Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking Web site has been in the news quite a bit recently, and most of it is for all the wrong reasons. 

Facebook is losing its teenage audience. Facebook will lose 80 per cent of its membership by the end of the decade. No, wait, Facebook isn’t losing its teen audience.

Amid all this fuss about popularity lost and found is a very real shift in the way that Facebook shares your posts to its pages and the profound effect it’s having on people who have trusted the company to bring their messages to potential customers.

Here’s what Facebook has done in simple terms. The service is placing more emphasis on posts that link to material outside the site and reducing the pervasiveness of posts that don’t. The company also has a often referenced aversion to sites that specialise in posts designed to be viral, such as Buzzfeed and Viralnova, so expect links to those sites to be deprecated as well.