Defining Facebook The Zuckerberg Way

About eight years ago when Facebook was not as big as it is today, Mark Zuckerberg (who needs no introduction), started a practice of holding town hall-style Q&As with his employees. Yesterday, on Nov 6, 2014, the public was allowed in on this Facebook tradition. Mark was pleased to answer questions of people from around the world in his first ever public Q&A session.

A new page 'Q&A with Mark' was created for the same purpose & people were asked to comment with their questions on a post. The posts which got maximum likes were answered by Mark. There were several questions ranging from intellectual to funny to personal.

But, one that caught our attention was about the organic reach of a brand/business's page.

Question:

Xeeshan Chaudhry - Hello Mark, when will organic reach of Facebook fan pages come back?

Marks Reply:

"We understand what it's like to be a business and we care really deeply how changes in our product affects all the business & fan pages. There are two primary trends that I think are affecting the fan pages. First is, people are sharing more information and following more pages who are sharing information on daily basis. Simply put, there is a lot of competition as to whose information is more relevant to a person. There is a minimum of 1500 posts on one persons timeline out of which you only see 100. This makes less than 10% of the total news feed. Only the highest quality content which communicates well with the customer surpasses the competition and makes it to the news feed.

Also, we see newsfeed as a personalized newspaper for each one of you. Something that may interest you may not interest me. We at Facebook, strive to provide the content you are most interested in. So if a business shares content that may be useful for a particular customer, it may appear on his/her newsfeed or else not."

Our Thoughts:

"Reduced organic reach provides people a more personalized Facebook experience and makes the product better." Says Mark.

We think reduced organic reach helps Facebook earn more money along with improving experience and making the product better.

Brands need to do more to increase their organic reach. Using their existing evangelists to help propagate is definitely the way to go.

With this session we hope Mark has made a point to state Facebook's mission very clearly. We had a fun time watching the session and had many takeaways. Hope you enjoyed it too and let us know your favourite takeaways from the same.

You can view the full session here: http://on.fb.me/13QtbM8