Facebook makes another change

While Twitter wobbles, Facebook continues to set the pace in social media platforms.

The numbers are surging despite fears that Facebook is hitting saturation point. Try these from Facebook:

  • 1.59 billion monthly users (up from 1.22 billion two years earlier)

  • 1 billion monthly WhatsApp users

  • 100 million hours of video watched each day

You can add to that a bunch of other numbers to underline Facebook's dominance.

But, how do you best reach these people without paying for ads? Plenty of advertisers are paying - Facebook reported ad earnings for the last quarter of more than $US5.6 billion.

And 80 per cent of that came from mobile advertising. That figure is stunning considering the struggles of newspapers and others to make any decent revenue from mobile ads.

If you don't want to pay to reach Facebook's many millions of people, then you need to know how to dominate their news feed. And Facebook has just announced a change that will harm those clickbait kings.

Facebook has revealed that it will take a dimmer view of those posts that promise a lot through an intriguing headline or video intro, only to disappoint. Yet again, Facebook is changing that mysterious algorithm that determines news feeds.

But Facebook does have one valuable tip: "Post things that your audience finds meaningful".

Sounds like a useful motto for many communication methods.