I've noticed that brands now post far too much stuff. Back in the day, if you 'Became a Fan' of a brand/band/organisation, you might expect maybe two posts a week, maybe less. Now liking a page means you can expect to be subjected to 5+ posts per day. No wonder people are hiding them from their feed/being more careful with what they follow on Facebook. People don't necessarily want to see 20.1% more posts from a brand than they did this time last year (and from a user end, it's good to see that Facebook is cutting it back).

On a related note, recently my group of close friends created a group on Facebook, which was originally to help with organising events/activities (because group messaging was becoming unweildy and distracting). The requirement for adding someone to the group is 'would anyone else be upset if the new member invited themselves along to anything posted here', so it's relatively small - about 20 members. But we've been using it for about 3 months, and it has almost become a social network in itself - people post things during the day, we interact without worrying how it looks to outsiders, and there are no posts which are 'showing off' the way facebook status updates sometimes do. I'm not being constantly marketed to. Facebook is fun again - like it was in university.