Facebook New Newsfeed Algorithm: What It Means for Your Business?

Facebook has overhauled how it ranks the posts, videos & photos that appear in its users’ News Feeds, introducing major changes designed to put what friends & family have to say first while making posts from businesses, brands & media less prominent.

If you’re an organization on Facebook, you may see the popularity of your posts decrease as a result, of the changes. That includes us!

The changes take effect over the coming weeks, prioritizing what your friends and family share in an effort by Facebook to help people spend time on the site in what it thinks is a more meaningful way. In short, you’ll see more posts from individuals and fewer cooking videos from brands and publications.

Facebook is making the changes by tinkering under the hood, re-configuring its algorithms (again) that guess what you may be most interested in. On January 11, 2018 in a post on the company’s blog , the head of its News Feed team, Adam Mosseri, wrote that it “means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.”

For many people, that news will come as a relief. In December,Facebook itself acknowledged that passive consumption of information — surfing shopping websites or reading news articles like this one — is often bad for your mood. According to a 2015 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that showed that passive usage of the website, even for just 10 minutes a day, had a negative effect on students’ sense of well-being.

Facebook will however, remain customizable, with the options that allow you to limit your exposure to certain people. One option is to quietly “snooze” a Facebook friend, which will cause their posts to disappear from your feed for 30 days. Yet another example of customizable content given by Facebook in a separate post will be live video feeds, which tend to generate much discussion.

Another change that Facebook will be rolling out is the separation of feeds by pages, organizations and groups from that of individuals. This change will not however affect their paid ads.

Facebook Algorithms Change..... Yet Again!

ANALYSIS.

In many ways this is Facebook getting back to its roots, making your news feed more about what your friends are creating and thinking, rather than articles they have shared.

Publishers and brands are the losers.

For news organisations and publications, this might spell bad news: a lot of traffic comes from Facebook. With less prominence, expect some viral sites to very quickly go out of business. The paid ads from businesses will not reflect this new algorithm change, which translates into more ad revenue for Facebook if companies want to maintain their reach as engagement that they have established thus far. Businesses will be forced to increase their ad budgets or shift their focus to other social media sites. This many are saying is self serving.

Those third-party organizations that take up large swaths of your News Feed years ago — sites that post funny pictures and memes, sell you clothing, or deliver articles about the world — will have the visibility of their posts scaled back under the new arrangement.

Mr Zuckerberg is perhaps learning in the wake of the fake news scandal, and a platform teeming with clickbait, that not all engagement is good engagement and that a news free-for-all maybe more trouble than it's worth.

Facebook expects you’ll spend less time on the site.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg said that it was the company’s expectation that many users would be gravitating to other sites to get their viral fix. But with more than two billion monthly active users (MAU) Facebook has gained a foothold that allows it to play a longer game. And if people begin to feel better while on the site, then Facebook and its users will benefit.

“By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” he said in his post about the changes. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”

Gabriel Kahn from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has said that “There should be public debate about the values they're applying to that algorithm” and we agree.

Mr Kahn added that the update from Mr Zuckerberg was a "clear admission" that Facebook wielded significant power over the health of society. However, he argued that the new priorities could further distort views and the nature of conversations.

The new change of course will cost Facebook money. Mr Zuckerberg warned investors at the end of last year that combating fake news would hurt the firm's bottom line. Facebook share price dropped 4.4% after their news feed change was announced.

But what most businesses are assessing is not just IF this move will hurt their bottom line questioning, By How Much?

What Are Your Thoughts on These Changes To Facebook?

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