Recently I’ve felt that Facebook has been quite boring, so I decided to investigate why. I analyzed the stories in my newsfeed this morning and have reached two conclusions:
1) My friends aren’t uninteresting, it’s the EdgeRank algorithm that’s messing up.
EdgeRank is supposed to favour friends’ posts over brand pages, but I’m getting bombarded by brand updates. This morning I have 43 posts by brands in my newsfeed and only 25 from actual friends. I also have 2 suggested posts (FB advertising), bringing the total to 45 brand updates. Understandably, Facebook is boring when 64% of the content I’m consuming is news and advertising, and only 35% is stories about my network of friends. If I wanted news, I would have gone to Twitter or Flipboard.
As I work in advertising, I LIKE an above average amount of brand pages, but I still don’t think the content should be this disproportionate in my newsfeed.

2) We may be reaching a mass fatigue of Facebook
I’m noticing a shift in behaviour on the social network as well. Some of the things I’ve noticed are:
- People posting less status updates. This isn’t that surprising as we’ve shifted to the “visual net” where pictures are favoured over text, but clever updates used to be an entertaining part of how I liked to interact with people on Facebook and it’s become a rare occurrence.
- Less likes, comments and shares by friends per post
- Less friend-to-friend interaction. This morning, only 4 friends interacted with each other publicly in my newsfeed. One guy posted on another guy’s wall, one girl liked a friend’s status update, one guy shared his friends’ link, and one girl liked her friend’s post. I’m sure people are still interacting a lot with each other on Facebook, but not much of it is being shared with me as a news story.
- Less check-ins…which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!
- Less photo albums, more individual photos as posts
This shift in interaction amongst my network of friends leads me to believe that the late 20s/30-something crowd may be getting tired of Facebook. Time will tell how this will impact the social network and online social media behaviour in general.
Are you noticing any changes in your newsfeed too?