Help, I am scared of the wind. Crazy winds! I feel like one of the three little pigs waiting for my house to fall in.

flea, I just went and got my Harbor Freight Tools headlamp, because a friend who lives up in Montgomery recently posted on FB that she lost power. Yikes!

It's about control, really. Any time that fb can convince a user to interact with a post in some way (click to see a photo better, see who commented, etc.) that piece of user engagement translates into big data. User patterns. Etc. If those clicks are tied into quantifiable things, brands, items, locations, demographic info, etc., then those interactions can be used to advance targeted marketing, the primary source of their revenue. This also means that it's necessary for them to reduce your user exposure to "free" brand building; i.e., corporate pages you liked, in order to encourage paid brand building; i.e., promoted posts and advertising.

So whatever greater control fb has over what you see and do not see, based on their algorithms, gives them greater insight into your marketing preferences and your propensities to like things they and their customers advance in the future. For example, they're on this thing now about showing you "more meaningful content" and fewer memes. Meaningful content in this iteration is links to articles, potential paying customers proving content. Then based on that they can offer you the other "more like this" links beneath the article your friend recommended. That is monetizable. You keeping up with the text only status updates of your bestie from college is not.

As far as managing what you see, fb seems determined to thwart all user intent through things like Social Fixer and whatnot. But you can still mark someone as an acquaintance (thus allowing you to limit both what you see of theirs and what they see of yours (if you select "friends except acquaintances" as your security level)) or you can now "unfollow" someone, which only limits what you see; they can still see whatever you post.

As an aside, if you have brands or musicians or authors or whoever that you actually do want to see posts from, it's important that you click, like, and share what you do see from them, and that will feed into the algorithm indicating your interest. Otherwise, some of what you see from the commercial pages will have diminished by up to 85% or so.

You can see what fb thinks is important to you by going to your page, logging in, and then running the script linked on this page. [link]

It uses a variety of factors (super seekrit trade info!) but includes time (more recently friended, etc.) and interactions. For example, it rates people for me as much higher in interest if I message them. Messages, incidentally, are also being stripped for marketing info, so don't think they're actually private even those you've limited them to one other person.

As an aside, if you have brands or musicians or authors or whoever that you actually do want to see posts from, it's important that you click, like, and share what you do see from them, and that will feed into the algorithm indicating your interest. Otherwise, some of what you see from the commercial pages will have diminished by up to 85% or so.

This does and doesn't work so well - when I share something on my author page, unless it gets forwarded and liked, only 10% of my audience sees it. So the sharing is a huge and growing part of it. Which is frustrating beyond measure. I don't want to have to ask people to share things just so other people who already indicated they wanted to see the same things can see them. GRUMBLE.

Wow, Liese. That was impressive! Thank you. I had no idea how/why a lot of that is done.

If I seem a little obsessive about it, it's because I am! It changes frequently; fb is run by people who are making some, shall we say, interesting choices about what should and shouldn't be done in social media.

But it affects me quite a lot, for the reasons that Sox mentions above. Hope in Transit has 1300 "fans" but the average post is seen by about 120 people. People that said, hey, keep me updated on Hope in Transit! If I pay for marketing, tens of thousands will see it.

Interesting.

So I end up doing a lot of click-baity shit. Like I just posted an old photograph I found (during decluttering, thanks, megan!) because it shows the SO sitting on a roundtable discussion panel with the musician I mentioned who's about to get in the GMA hall of fame. It's only tangentially related to the ministry. But it has a total reach of 500 in only two hours. And off-prime hours at that.

And now I am grateful I don't work in a Social Media Marketing. That sounds exhausting.

It really, really does. And it also makes me realize I have no idea what I'm doing with my author page (which I've neglected for a year anyway, but still).

I need to scan some more pictures. I keep missing Throwback Thursday.