Recently Facebook announced significant changes to its news feed, where the Facebook algorithm will now prioritise posts from friends and family ahead of content from business pages and news. The change aims to give Facebook users more quality time on the network by providing them with highly relevant and engaging content.
Over the years Facebook has switched from a network that connected friends and family to one of the biggest distributors of news and online ads in the world. The news feed changes hope to revert the site to focusing on user well-being and the connection between friends and family. Because of this change, users will now see more personal posts in their news and fewer public posts from businesses, brands and media.
There are still opportunities to win organically on Facebook, but they will be harder to attain. Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease, depending on the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages that distribute content that people don’t engage with will see the biggest decreases in organic reach. Pages that have been able to generate high engagement by producing quality content that is meaningful and memorable to their audiences will see less of an effect.
Facebook advertising overall is expected to increase as more businesses and news outlets pay for their content to be distributed, reaching users they used to be able to reach organically. With demand for ads increasing, ad prices are also expected to go up.
There has been a significant downward trend in the organic reach of Facebook content over the past few years due to the large amount of content available. The algorithm change is an important update, however, let’s not forget that businesses have already been paying their way into user news feeds for several years.
The new algorithm change is a reminder that to get results, content published must matter to your audience.
Summary
- With the news feed algorithm changes, users can expect to see less content pushed from businesses and news outlets and more from friends and family.
- Businesses that focus on creating highly relevant and engaging content will have the best on-going results.
- Facebook advertising costs are likely to increase as more businesses pay to have their content distributed into news feeds.
- Although this is an important update – businesses have already been paying their way into user news feeds for several years.
