Saturday, July 08, 2017

Facebook could do better with its measurements

In this wide-ranginginterview with Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired from Columbia Journalism Review, where they spoke on topics such as fake news to disruptions that technology has brought about, what caught my eye was how he felt that Facebook could do better in terms of measurements.

We know, from our own experiences, that Facebook’s news algorithm is biased towards humor, sensationalism, and celebrities, especially clickbaits with intriguing headlines, funny, viral videos and whatnot.

We also learned in class how Facebook measures engagement: the number of people who like, comment or share it, and the amount of time people spend reading something. This is probably why the above-mentioned stories get the kind of attention they do on Facebook.


Beyond all these, however, he felt that there are a whole bunch of other factors one could measure. One could semantically analyze the words in the comments. One could come up with a meta-quality score for different publications, and thereby serve better content. These are useful thought starters for content marketers. It certainly got met thinking about some of the ways we could implement to better measure outcomes and results, in a way that could better our marketing efforts.

No comments: