Facebook New News Feed: Back to Basics
When Facebook announced they are changing the news feed algorithm. My first reaction was “This will kill the Page reach.”. In their blog post, Facebook revealed: “As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease…”
Many publishers and brands have openly criticized Facebook’s move. This will have a big impact on brands and publishers whose only source of traffic and revenue is Facebook. Many local brands use Facebook page, and they don’t have websites. They were doing good business on Facebook, now all of sudden they are out of business.
After the big announcement, Facebook published a series of posts explaining the reason behind this decision. In the last week of January, they also said they will give priority to local news on Facebook. In a blog post, Facebook said, “We are prioritizing local news as a part of our emphasis on high-quality news, and with today’s update, stories from local news publishers may appear higher in “News Feed” for followers in publishers’ geographic areas.”
With all the announcement and the plans, now I think Facebook’s new NewsFeed is actually a good idea, for both users and brands. Wired has published a real long story about Facebook’s struggle as they tried to become a media company. I am realizing that they tried to experiment with everything. They tried to be a news and media company but failed as they could not fix the fake news. They launched instant article for publishers but they could not live up to the promises they made. Many big publishers have already left the instant article. And Facebook Page reach was also declining.
Facebook used to focus on engagement. Comments, Shares, and Likes are the metrics for engagement. As Facebook evolved, its focus shifted towards video, news and lot more. And it was a different Facebook. Fake news, videos and click bait were flooding the news feed. And it was getting monotonous. It even had an impact on elections. In fact, people gamed their system to their advantage.
Learning lessons from all these developments, Facebook looks serious and committed to make Facebook a better platform. Facebook is going back to basics. They are focusing on the engagement. At the same time, they are also finding a way to fight fake news, click and engagement bait.
In their blog post, dated last December, they said: “We are fighting engagement bait on Facebook.” Facebook also said, ‘People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions. For example, “LIKE this if you’re an Aries!” This tactic, known as “engagement bait,” seeks to take advantage of our News Feed algorithm by boosting engagement in order to get greater reach. So, starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts from people and Pages that use engagement bait.’
If everything goes according to Facebook’s plan. I think it’ll be a win-win situation for both users and brands. Brands that create genuine and engaging content is going to benefit from this change. As usual, a video could be the top engaging posts, as people are likely to share and comment on a video.
Now Facebook looks out for more signals to figure out whether a post is engaging. For example, your brand published a post on Facebook, and you ask people to share it on their profile. Great news: the number of shares shows your post is engaging. Bad news, if there’s no engagement on the post that gets shared on their profile. Your brand’s post will be demoted because you just tried to game their system by increasing the number of shares. Just sharing a link would not help, it has to produce a good engagement among the users.
Dear marketers and publishers, let’s make Facebook a better place for brands and businesses. Let’s try to create conversations around genuine and valuable contents.
Originally published at aakar.me.
