Facebook was used a lot to share photographs of day to day happenings and important life events in its earlier days, but sharing on the platform is not the same anymore. The social network relies on users for the majority of its content, but now they are posting less on the network, according to survey results.
Users sharing less on Facebook
Market researcher GloablWebIndex found in a study on the sharing habits of people that 34% of Facebook users updated their status and only 37% shared their own photos in the third quarter, says a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Even now, users do visit the network quite often, and as of June, 65% of Facebook’s 1.49 billion monthly users visited the site at least once on a daily basis. But the majority of prefer to lurk or like rather than posting a note or sharing a picture, the survey found. The head of trends at GlobalWebIndex, Jason Mander, said, “Facebook can potentially seem quite dry or quite boring” if fewer users share or post on it.
Older surveys have also hinted at a similar trend for Facebook. In 2010, Pew Research Center found that 14% of U.S. users updated their status at least once a day, and 61% did this at least once every few weeks. By 2013, the numbers had dropped to 10% and 47% respectively.
Not a problem now
This is not a problem for the social network today as it makes money through advertising. Facebook is scheduled to report its third quarter financial results on Wednesday, and many expect a massive jump of 36% in revenue. This could be a problem some time in the future though.
In a 2009 paper, Facebook researchers said social networks need to encourage users to share more content on the platform. Facebook is constantly coming up with new features to tackle this problem. Since May, the social network has been placing prompts at the top of the news feeds of some users. These prompts are related to ongoing events and are aimed at spurring conversations. Facebook has informed that it partly uses the likes and locations of a user for choosing the prompts to be placed on their news feeds.
