What are the goals for Facebook's Newsfeed?

When you say goals I believe what you might be seeking for is how do we measure success and what specific OKR we shall establish to evaluate success of FB Newsfeed? (correct).

ok, I am sure I undersatnd newsfeed but will clairfy that and then let's dive a bit into why it's an important product for FB and how it's used. How it's used helps us think about what to measure for success. Are you ok with that approach? (yes)

NF is the main fb product where you see posts from friends, advertisements that are mainly AI driven, etc. So basically this a 2 sided market place product for FB and it adds user value because NF is the primary way it keeps our users coming back to FB (be it consumers of businesses who want to advertise). From business impact standpoint FB's digital advertising biz is mianly driven off of NF. NF also has actions users can take such as comments, sharing with friends, likes / reactions, etc. Correct? (yes).

Now do you have any specific scope in mind as we evaluate success? I mean, is there any specific Objective leadership has such as increasing users, improving ux, etc.? (no). Ok, is there a specific user segment that we want to meausre success for? (no). Alright then, I think I would wnat to focus on consumer segment just because ther are plenty more consumers and we can make a bigger impact if we focus on this segment. (sure). Also, considering FB is a mature biz, we should likely focus on engaging our users more and also see if we are able to retain their interest (which menas we have added value). However, since Engagement is a driver of Retention, can we focus on Engagement? (sure). Would you like me to focus on Engagement just for consumer segment or consumer and biz both? (pick one and since you said consumer that's fine too).

Ok...give me few minutes to think through how we can evaluate engagement while ensuring that measuring those would help us validate adding user value.

1)....ok, so I realize scope is qutie wide. Is there specific aspect of NF I should evaluate success for? (I am glad you asked. How about you pick? Would like to know what you have in mind).

ok, so there are various actions users can take such as commetns, likes, etc. So we could evaluate success of one of those feautures maybe. (sure). ok, how about Comments? (sure).

1) % of users commenting on at least 5 posts / week. Here I am measuring it per week since most users of FB can be assume to be quite young and young people usually go onto FB twice-thrice a week if not more. So 1 week will give us enough data to evaluate. (fair). Also, 5 is an arbitrary number and in real life I would work with Data Scientist to figure out waht that number should be. Our ultimate goal should be retention resulting from engagement, so maybe what I would try to uncover is what is that inflection point that has helps gain retention from engagement state.

2) % of users spending atleast 10 min on FB / session. The downside to this is that if people are using FB on mobile then session doesn't necessarily end. So we may get skewed data on this one. But on the flip side, I also doubt how many are going to be commenting on FB mobile. In fact, maybe we don't need to worry about any of this since we can separrate out mobile users from desktop users and separately analyze this data. But otherwise, I believe that most users easily spend 10 min on FB considering it's so addictive so if user spent more time I can be assured that we have effectively engaged the user. However, just becasue we have engaged the user may not be all positive because if the user has seen all sad posts or negative messaging, they may be very appauled and may not want to return back. So we may want to think of measuring user's sentiment during each session.

3) % users scrolling through atleast 10 posts/wk. I think it's normal for users to easily scrol through 10 posts but again this is a number I would have to determine after carefully looking at data pulled by Data Scientist. I also wonder if we have a way to identify this number and here I am assuming we do.

Given all of the above, while # 3 is the one that is high on business impact, it does hae a potential issue of not sure if user liked everthing he/she saw. I believe our goal shouldnt be business impact (revenue generation) but should be more user experience and value add. For that reason I believe #1 adds the most to that.

Are we aligned? (yes)

Great! Towards setting up a goal I would want to point to seomething I noted earlier and that's the discovering the inflection point that helps turn an engagement of a user to retention. Whatever that number is is what I would set to be my goal over course of a month. I think month is reasonable timeframe since in the digital world of social networking, features catch on fast.

To summarize, all in all we had wannted to set some goals for FB NF. I figured my to address consumers since that's the largest pool of customer segment and then measuring success of something specific such as comments. Is there something that I am missing?

(no. You are good. Thank you very much.)

1. Clarifying Questions
What type of goals are we focusing on? Business/Strategy goals or Metrics

2. Goals
We want to drive user engagement on the platform. Facebook benefits from having users engage within the platform and it increases retention and drives monetization opportunities within the Ad product. More engagement means that Facebook learns more about the user and can help tailor the content that they see and drive more relevant ads.

3. User Journey
When a user lands on facebook.com, they will be presented with their customized newsfeed where they can scroll through it and see content (posts, news, 3p app updates, updates, etc) relevant to them. Some actions the use can take:
* Scroll
* View content
* Share content
* Save content
* Like content
* React to content

4. Metrics

Engagement
* DAU, WAU, MAU — we can define an active user by landing on facebook.com
* Average time spent on the newsfeed
* Number of Likes/Comments/Reactions/Shares across content
* Time spent watching videos
Retention
* Churn rate (churn could be defined by the user who deletes Facebook account or who hasn’t logged on in 30 days)
Monetization
* Average revenue generated per user

5. Evaluate

We should focus on engagement metrics and maximize interest for the user that should primarily be organic content from friends, people you follow, and pages you like.