Join us Dec. 1-3 in New Orleans for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit
People like numbers, and in social media, one key metric brands, agencies and publishers pay attention to is the amount of followers or likes one has. The like obsession has a bit of a “scoreboard” mentality. Facebook has fed this with ad products specifically designed to boost brands’ likes.
But now, Facebook appears to be shifting course. It began last month, when Facebook began making clear to brands that its likes don’t mean a whole lot when it comes to distribution. Just 16 percent of brand updates get through. Now, Facebook is cracking down on like fraud, achieved via “malware compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk likes.”
While Facebook tacitly endorsed this follower mentality, it’s nice to see it move beyond the like. It is now emphasizing how many people are talking about brands. Overall social media has been infected, on both a personal and corporate level, with “follower envy” that obscures its real power of direct communication.
More in Media
How Forbes is using ChatGPT referral data to create audience cohorts
Semrush and Similarweb provide information, including the prompts that led an AI platform user to click through to a publisher’s site, that Forbes is able to use to learn more about its AI-referred audience’s interests.
AI slop myths, debunked: What’s harmful, what’s hype, what’s just meh
AI slop has become a catch-all for low-quality AI content, because it’s fast, sticky shorthand. But that convenience hides the nuances that are emerging.
Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe, October 2025 edition
Publishers said they have lost hope that traffic will ever bounce back, in a closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe