Publishers and brands set for drastic fall in Facebook traffic after major news feed revamp
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed the news that publishers have been dreading – that the social media platform will be downgrading posts from media outlets and brands in favour of posts from friends and video content.
Zuckerberg: Less content from brands and media
In a post to Facebook today, Zuckerberg said he is instructing the company’s product teams to focus on helping people find relevant content that leads to more meaningful social interactions despite the move being likely to reduce users’ time spent on the site.
For news outlets that rely heavily on Facebook for traffic, the move is likely to have drastic consequences.
Is FB talking about only reducing organic posts of brands, publishers etc? Presumably brands, publishers etc can still get into the newsfeed if they pay? Perhaps this is really what these changes are all about….
For publishers that don’t rely on Facebook to drive the majority of their referrals, this may actually be a good thing, as media money gets redirected back to the good guys.
For those that do…yikes.
@minnie – that sounds about right to me…
Be interesting to watch FB’s video focus. Certainly v YouTube…
This will sadly have a big impact on small animal rescue groups who have come to rely heavily on FB to promote rescues and encourage donations. Presumably they would need to transition existing ‘business’ pages to groups to stay on the news feed.
Bad for publishers, no doubt (watch Facebook fire up its own content generation / monetization engines) but for brands this is simply a final and inevitable death knell for organic distribution (the Explore Tab may provide some respite), which raises the bar once again for audience led / shareable / inspiring content.
Strategically and reputation-ally it makes sense. Facebook can afford to play the long game with .com while it amps up other platforms and services. The big risk is the assumption that the people you care about are still posting on Facebook.
This would mean people would need to actually post thing on Facebook for publisher to be worried.
Who are the good guys?
Very curious to know if they’re specifically referring to organic reach here, or whether there will be implications for paid activity, too (i.e. brands/publishers suddenly reach smaller audiences at the same level of spend).
So does that mean us small business owners want be seen Now
The Australian owned publishers and media businesses employing people locally.
Absolutely. They’re turning themselves into a traditional advertising platform to ensure their business continues to grow.
Will be interesting to see if more and more people start moving off the platform.
The new trend of posting text and pictures as videos are already turning people off (anecdotal)
Definitely a play by Facebook to increase ad inventory volumes which has previously been the case with every other adjustment product wise. I anticipate in line with an earlier article on Digiday they’ll end up with their own News feed.
Shows you what an absolute crock of **** the Facebook Journalism Project was!!
The joy, the joy. FB capitulating. Outbrain, Google, Criteo, Taboola rejoice.
Watch FB’s audience drop. Who cares about cats and friends kids these days? They harking back to 2013.
Positive move I think. Brand pages have been trying to game the organic algorithm through cheesy engagement-bait tactics (“tag a mate who’d xxx!” ) and this is the logical push back. The top of the feed (especially first thing in the morning) felt like an ordeal to be endured before you got to friends’ posts, cheesy though they might be too… #blessed.
If the overall feedback is users have a more positive experience on feed they’ll come back more and FB and FB advertisers both win.
*Side note – official comms to agencies is that the ad auction is not affected by this change.
Almost since joining FB I’ve sorted my newsfeed by ‘most-recent’. It’s the first button you should press. F*ck the algorithm telling me what I should see.
Globally, thousands and thousands of jobs have been destroyed in the craft of journalism due to this platform. Investigative journalism that shines a light into the corners that need it is now on its knees. Facebook has to live with the fact they helped elect trump. Fact.
Facebook laughs and says ‘catch up publishers’ but they’re not tech companies and shouldn’t be.
Now it’s back to prioritising cats and family pictures no one cares about?
The behaviour of many publisher pages has necessitated this change: more is not more, the sheer volume of posts in a desperate attempt to get a few clicks is just spamming.
Facebook has been pretty clear for some time: if you want reach, pay. They don’t owe you anything for free.
real publishers with a purpose will not feel any effect. publishers that rely on facebook as the main source of traffic will in the end fail.
I’ve disabled facebook autoplay and I auto-scroll past anything that says sponsored. The businesses, brands and publishers I have expressed an interest in seeing news/posts from have their reach strangulated, and now from the sounds of things, pretty much snuffed out. So tell me again what the benefit of advertising on facebook is to engage with someone like me?