Was 2016 really that bad? Or have we misremembered it all? As is customary, it’s the time of year to take a look back at the events that flooded our Facebook feeds over the last twelve months. 2016 was notable perhaps for being the year when extremely popular content, widely shared and engaged with, was completely absent from …
Live video is Facebook’s current star feature. Ever since its launch this spring, Facebook has been heavily promoting it in the News Feed, giving live videos immense reach and therefore engagement. The idea is not new – Meerkat, Periscope, and other dedicated live-streaming apps have popularised live video over the last few years. Though the …
The U-Shaped Curve In Mark Zuckerberg’s famous words, Facebook is a tech company, not a media company. Yet we know that the reality is more complicated than that. Regular users, politicians, and publishers are all affected by changes in the Facebook algorithm. The U-Shaped curve is a good example. In 2016 we saw a global …
Our recently launched Chrome extension already has many fans amongst our customers. When you add it to your browser, you can see at a glance a detailed breakdown of all the social media engagement any article has generated. Some use it to check how well their own story is doing. Others use the extension to keep an …
In July we reported on how Facebook algorithm changes affected Nordic media publishers. SocialFlow had previously analysed the impact of the changes in the USA. They reported a worrisome 42% drop off in news publishers’ Facebook reach in the US. Our main takeaway was that Nordic news publishers got off quite lightly – except Norway who was affected to the same degree …
Yesterday Facebook announced an upcoming change to News Feed ranking that essentially further prioritises stories posted by friends over ones posted by anyone else – including publishers and brands. Engineering Director Lars Backstrom reiterates Facebook’s priority of keeping users connected to the people, places and things they care about, people on their friends list being the most important. …
Recently, Facebook expressed worries about becoming a link-sharing platform instead of a place to share our personal lives. Soon after, the US publishing platform SocialFlow reported a 42 % drop in Facebook reach per post for US media companies’ Facebook pages. In the first post from EzyInsights’ data analyst Varpu Rantala, we take a dive …
Your definitive guide to today’s media circus. The UK referendum on whether to leave the European Union aka “Brexit” is the word on everyone’s screens today. In the UK, most people (one would hope) are aware of what it is. Newsfeeds are stuffed full of articles about it, but what exactly are they reporting about. …
Cashing in a promise made in February, Facebook has opened up its Instant Articles platform to all publishers. The release coincides with Facebook’s annual F8 conference, held in San Francisco this week. As part of an ideal of enabling users to take care of business without leaving Facebook, Instant Articles provide Facebook mobile users with fast-loading, sleek, mobile-optimized versions …
When Facebook says ‘jump’, media publishers ask “How high?” With the introduction of Facebook’s new reactions, every digital media publisher must rethink how it presents its articles on the platform to maximise engagement.
EzyInsights is proud to announce something we’ve been working on for a long time behind the scenes. SoMe Index is a website which contains all publisher engagement data from social media, ordered and filtered to give an impartial and realistic view of how news & content publishers are performing. Our first territory for SoMe Index …
When I talk to different online publishers, one of the questions I often ask is what percentage of their web traffic comes from social. And if you know me you know that when I say social I mean Facebook, which trounces every other platform in terms of referrals to mainstream and general news, Facebook dominates. So …
Measuring data in digital publishing is well established. Everyone does it, it’s expected, but there’s a huge problem, not everyone is measuring the same thing. Traffic and referrals being the closest linked to actual revenue, tend to be measured in an accurate way across publishers (although even then…). But this information is exclusive to each publisher. So how can …
If you’re in the news publishing industry you’ve probably already heard of both Facebook’s Instant Articles, which is currently being trialled by a handful of big publishers worldwide, and Google’s own version, named Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP. Both schemes aim to tackle the problem of sluggish loading of news and content pages on mobile. This has become …
The importance of the Facebook Newsfeed algorithm for publishers cannot be underestimated. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a fundamental shift in people’s behaviour when hunting down news. In the past, getting news digitally was at least a semi-active affair. People would navigate to news websites manually, using bookmarks, typing the address in manually …
Unilad and The Lad Bible are the dominant viral presences online right now. Now they are monetising your attention, sometimes without you even realising.