A leading web analytics company says in a new report that traffic from Facebook to some of the top news publishers declined at double-digit rates in the second quarter of this year. SimilarWeb found that Facebook visits to some media companies are down by as much as 50% compared with the first quarter.

Source: Fortune

Date: August 17th, 2016

Link: http://fortune.com/2016/08/16/facebook-traffic-media/

Discussion

1) The article notes that “Facebook said that it was going to de-emphasize articles from mainstream media sites in favor of posts from a user’s friends and family. Any decline in Facebook traffic can have a huge impact on media companies because they rely on that traffic for a large proportion of their advertising revenue.”  Imagine you are responsible for the social media aspect of a company you work for.  What can you do to improve traffic for your company?

2) “BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen pointed out that the SimilarWeb numbers only apply to desktop visits from Facebook, which suggests that some of the decline could be a result of web traffic moving to mobile. About half of the social network’s 1.4 billion users access the site primarily on a mobile device.”  This move-to-mobile is something that most college students are acutely familiar with.  What difference does it make that a person goes to a website on their mobile device versus their desktop computer?