Facebook’s Metaverse Is Now Smaller
Facebook has had a dramatic drop in usage, according to an analysis by social media monitoring firm NewsWhip. What is most striking is that the dropoff occurred before the recent series of criticisms and controversy about its alleged attempts to stoke traffic by stoking anger. So it may get even worse.
The report lays out the level of
engagement on Facebook in the third quarter of this year.
Engagement is loosely defined as the total number of Likes, Shares, and Comments along with reactions of Sad, HaHa, Angry, Love and Wow.
The report breaks it out based on Top Publishers, Pages and Posts. It also compares this year to previous years. Several key points stand out:
- Total engagement dropped to less than a third what it was last year at the same time and is at the lowest it has been for the past five years.
2. The average engagement per article is also less than a third what it was last year and again the lowest it has been for the past five years.
3. Political postings also dropped significantly in the last quarter despite, as the analysis says, Facebook being a politically-driven source.
4. Conservative publishers continue to have a high level of engagement with The Daily Wire holding the #1 spot.
5. The ‘Angry’ emoji is the least used in posts but is associated with one publisher in particular — Fox.
That last two points need to be clarified in light of repeated complaints by conservatives that Facebook penalizes or downplays conservative voices and recent criticisms that it exploits hate and anger to increase user involvement.
Of the 15 top web publishers cited in the report, seven of them are clearly conservative, and many might say, ultra-conservative in their tone and subject matter. The other eight publishers are mainstream media outlets that critics would say are ‘liberal’ in tone although many of those outlets would object to that labelling. Regardless, if you add up the total number of engagements for conservative publishers, it comes to roughly 413-thousand. If you add up the total number of engagements for the other publishers, it’s adds about 352-thousand. The conservative user is much more engaged.
Fox News’s Facebook page scores the greatest number of Angry emoji reactions. (It should be pointed out that while it’s not in the Newswhip report, Facebook reportedly has reduced the weight given Angry responses to lower its impact.) Fox News also scores the greatest number of Sad emojis, and the greatest number of Comments. Comments can reflect a variety of reactions but research has shown hate and anger are more likely to elicit a response than any of the other reactions. The Post that got the most Angry responses was one by Tonio Skits about an 83-year-old fighting off a burglar. I will confess that I did not know about Tonio Skits.
According to his Bio, he “entertains the masses with his superb charm and Latin flavor.” Clearly it’s working because he has 4.2 Million followers. Just as clearly he authored the bio which makes one of the stranger notes I’ve ever read — that he graduated with a 3.8 GPA from Miami-Dade College. So?
But the big winner in the Facebook Posting sweepstakes was Thinkarete Lifestyle — another Facebook source that I confess I knew nothing about, even though it turns out I have nine friends who like it. It bills itself as place for meals and recipes, but it ranges much further than that. Its four ‘winning’ posts were — do you believe in God, and the power of prayer… Marriages last for eight years, how long have you been with your spouse… 800 seats in Heaven, the last three digits of your phone number, determine your seat… and when you were a child, did you have to share a bedroom with your sibling.
Other unusual winners in the top post category were
- EducatedMindsPage which Newswhip showed had 82 Million engagements but which my research showed only 7,000 followers;
- DoYouRememberWhen1 which has 2.4 Million followers but which scored 66 Million engagements;
- Womenworking which has 19 Million followers and scored 66 Million engagements.
Lastly it should be noted that while politics has dropped, sports topics along with health topics make up a great deal of the successful postings and pages.
In particular, Soccer — with Manchester United scoring as the top Facebook page by a wide margin (112,000 engagements), the BleacherReport scoring as the top Facebook page by a publisher (90,000) and soccer great Cristiano Ronaldo scoring three of the top ten posts. One has to wonder whether Newswhip’s being based in Dublin, Ireland, has something to do with its analysis of the numbers.
