The World's Biggest Social Media Platform is Undergoing an Ideology Shift

The world's biggest social media platform, some may even call it the world's largest nation, Facebook, has recently announced that they have decided to shift their ideology.

From showing the most meaningful content to people to encouraging the most meaningful interactions.

What does this mean?

Simply put, your Facebook news feed will still consist of cute, funny, and exciting viral videos, but the focus will be on the discussion among your friends and even strangers on those particular videos. However, viral videos will slowly become less and less prevalent in your news feed as time goes on while Facebook continues this ideology shift.

Now here comes some interesting data that comes along with it:

One of Facebook's core statistics that stockholders and social media business analytics pay attention to are "time spent on the network by users" has shown to be down by an estimated 50 million hours per day. Because Facebook now reaches 2.13 billion people per month with 1.4 billion daily active users, that would show for a decrease of 2.1 minutes per user per day.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, and there are certainly more decreases in statistical numbers to come for Facebook. However, to Mark Zuckerberg, this is not a concern because of the intention behind this decrease of Facebook usage. As Zuckerberg has stated,

By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term.

There is another thing to note as well, if there is less usage time of Facebook users on Facebook, does that not mean there are less ads being viewed, and therefore less revenue? No, why? If more meaningful conversations occur, this will promote Facebook users to be more engaged on Facebook, and as Zuckerberg remarks, "When you care about something, you're willing to see ads to experience it." This also means that users will be more likely to actually click on these advertisements which incur much more revenue in the long run.

Also, this is an important part to social media, as through the three-point strategy, one of the strategies is to participate. If Facebook content on your news feed is much more meaningful to you, you are more prone to participate.

Simple as that.

With all this being said, revenue was never an issue for Facebook, as their last quarter of 2017, Facebook had a gain of $2.21 billion, compared to their $1.94 projected. Well isn't that lovely.

With all this being said, there are still plenty of other efforts that Facebook is conducting to increase their user base as a whole. One of those being to keep users as active on Facebook as they can. Another to make sure those who have stopped using Facebook, come back. All of these efforts are for the bigger picture that Facebook has in mind.

If you're not on social media, are you really existing?