Facebook ($FB) seemingly falls down the bad news tree and hits every single branch all the time, and the last few weeks were have been particularly rough for the social media and technology giant. But no matter how bad things seem, Facebook's earnings seem to always outperform the expectations, and this is beginning to get on the nerves of non-shareholders.
That's because there is mounting evidence that Facebook helped manage American democracy with Russain interference and political advertisements, misled publishers about video viewership numbers which put countless people out of jobs, and teen depression and suicide rates have jumped all thanks to Facebook being run like a social media monopoly and not as a media outlet and disruptor of every imaginable industry.
But despite all that, Facebook's beat sent shares up 3% in trading!
Let's focus on the data, Thinknum's bread and butter. Job listings for Facebook took a nosedive, and has been quite erratic over the last few months. This isn't a troubling sign, because the staff count is still astronomical when we zoom out and look at the company as a whole.
Facebook's employee count is astronomical as well, and the number of users on LinkedIn listing Facebook as their employer is approaching 60,000.
Finally, you can see that people on Facebook have been talking about the company, especially as Zuckerberg sat down for his testimony (which was supposed to be about Libra, strangely enough). There was an increase of hundreds of thousands of people chattering about the company on its own platform, by our 'Talking About' metric.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.