Roy Greenslade: For publishers and advertisers alike, Facebook cannot be ignored

“Facebook plans to deliver the internet from space”. “Woman launches Facebook hunt to find man of her dreams”. “Facebook is a waste of time, say marketeers”. “Facebook carries page vilifying autistic people”. “Worker dismissed over Facebook pay criticism”. “Bondi beach guards in Facebook spat”.

These headlines, culled from a random search illustrate the ubiquity of Facebook.

In just over 11 years, the social networking site run by Mark Zuckerberg has become entrenched in modern culture across great swathes of the globe. More than a billion people look at Facebook every day.

It has been estimated that American users spend nearly as much time on the site a day as they do actually socialising with people face to face. That has turned Facebook into an online advertising behemoth that posted revenues of $12.5 billion (£8.23 billion) in 2014.

FB has also supplanted newspapers as the main provider of news. Mainstream press owners and editors now routinely talk of their main rival not being a print competitor or radio and television outlets but Facebook.

It is the place where people go, hour by hour, to tell their own stories and learn about other people’s stories. For many users, it is more of an addiction than a service and Facebook works hard at keeping them hooked through its news feeds.

These persuasive feeds are constructed through sophisticated algorithms, automated software that tracks each user’s actions in order to serve them with the content they’re most likely to want. It is created by human beings and then amended on a weekly basis by more human beings.

Newspaper publishers, aware that readers tell them they get most, and possibly all, of their news from Facebook, have sought to break into this charmed circle. In order to lure readers to their own websites, they feel obliged to use Facebook’s platform.

They know how important it is because analytics enable them to track the source of the referrals to their articles, whether it be Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or yet another of the start-ups that have sprung up in the last couple of years.

Google, by a fairly wide margin, remains the largest referrer. But Facebook has been catching up. Well, up to now, it has. There have been some signs of late that it may have reached its pinnacle.

Nevertheless, whether its progress has stalled or not, it remains a powerful tool for publishers to drive traffic to their sites and understandably they have therefore devoted considerable resources to designing Facebook strategies.

For instance, in Trinity Mirror’s regional newsrooms analysts are now working alongside journalists to ensure they can maximise social media exposure for their work. Plenty of other publishers have been doing that for a good while.