How many hours a day do you spend on Facebook? Are you a serial status updater, quick to give a like or love to share? Then you’re one of the 955 million monthly active users on Facebook. According to Facebook Head of Audience Insights Robert D’Onofrio, 85% of monthly users are creating some form of content but their definition of content is rather broad. Surely writing a status update about your recent cringe worthy date or compiling a photo album to conjure up travel envy means more than liking, “Coke Australia,” or sharing the latest ecard (which is often used as a status update without the effort of writing one). To Facebook these different types of content are rated the same. But should they be?

For work, my aim is to get as many shares, likes and comments as possible, just like any other brand.

While I love to sit back and watch the numbers increase on my brand page at work, I’m not so keen after work. I scroll through the day’s posts on my personal account and all I see is brand updates, product placement, ecards and now ads suggesting pages I may like to, ‘like.’

For me I miss the injection of the personal; the ideas, random thoughts and questions that my friends used to post.

In our eagerness to connect we have found ways to make doing so easier and as a result I feel we have gotten lazy. We’ve begun to place as much value on sharing someone else’s ideas as creating our own. Most days my Facebook feed is filled with the same content and the more memes I see the less I feel connected to my friends. Do you feel the same?

In some ways I’m no different, just as guilty. I love ecards, I share a lot of NGO posts and I laugh (sometimes a lot) at memes. Seeing Facebook from both sides reminds me how important the creator of content is. Without the person it’s just words, pictures and advertising.

Featured image from Wikimedia.