Facebook is No Longer for Thoughts

When I worked in Meta, I had an internal workplace group called “Yunkai’s Tidbits”, and it was well received. Towards the last couple of years, work got busy, and I didn’t have much time to write. Therefore when I left Meta, I decided to commit to regularly writing and publishing. For the platform, as suggested by a former Meta colleague, I chose Substack. For the domain, as suggested by a former Google colleague, I registered yunk.ai.

• Figuring out logistics of publishing, check.

• Finding time to write, check.

• Next task: distribution.

Since most of my content is tech / career related, distributing to LinkedIn is the natural choice. And so far the results have been great. The following is the growth chart of subscribers.

Last week, as inspired by Celine Dion’s performance at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, I wrote I Am: Celine Dion. While the content has some tech / career implications, for the most part it’s a personal story, and therefore I felt Facebook was the more suitable channel. I shared the post on Facebook, and not on LinkedIn.

4 hours in, zero impressions / likes / reactions on Facebook.

When I first noticed this, my immediate reaction was my Facebook account got flagged and thus no distribution. I manually created a few more posts just to test whether they get any distribution. One of my close friends told me that he could see all the posts on my Facebook profile. This means that my account was fine, but the post was not showing up on others’ newsfeed.

In other words, it’s the Facebook newsfeed ranking algorithm that decided to downrank my post and not distribute it.

A few hours later I decided to post it on LinkedIn as well, just for comparison. Impressions / reactions on LinkedIn for this post were lower than other tech / career dedicated topics, but they still accrued. LinkedIn surpassed Facebook in distribution quickly, even though LinkedIn had less time.

So, the lesson learned here is even for personal story content like this, LinkedIn outperformed Facebook as a better distribution channel.

But why?

It’s ironic that I worked in the Facebook App org for several years, and I actually have deep connections / knowledge about Facebook newsfeed ranking. I simply forgot about it until this experiment.

• Facebook newsfeed downranks posts with outgoing links.

  • Facebook app today is not the same as the original Facebook app 15 years ago. When Facebook first came out, it’s a place where people re-discovered their old friends, and genuinely shared their latest updates. Users scrolled on Facebook to learn about what their friends were doing. The content was referred to as a connected feed.

  • Facebook app today is to try to keep users to scroll, period. Most content is unconnected, like popular reels. Of course, this is in response to users’ changing behavior. TikTok has demonstrated that users, especially younger generations, like to scroll on entertaining unconnected content.

  • If the post has an outgoing link, it increases the chance users click on the link, leave the Facebook app, and not come back right away. Thus posts with outgoing links likely hurt overall short-term engagement, and are downranked.

• Facebook (or any social media) ranking is now oriented towards encouraging low-friction reactions (including likes, emojis, etc).

  • 15 years ago, social media encouraged comments and conversations. Those were the preferred demonstration of interest.

  • Now social media encourages likes. It’s a lot less effort for users, and you can make an argument that a post with 100 likes is more interesting than a post with 10 comments.

  • Conversations are disappearing; many social media become primarily for one-way communication.

In summary, Facebook / Instagram / Snap / TikTok are distribution channels for content that’s image / video centric, and first-instinct reaction driven. Content that requires deep thoughts to consume? Not the most suited here. I guess I’ll mostly stick to LinkedIn for my content going forward.

As a side note, I understood all of these as an insider, but still forgot as a genuine user. This is the amazing piece that made me reflect: Never forget the viewpoint of a genuine end user; we always respond to a product as a genuine end user, not as an insider.