Saturday, November 15, 2014

Facebook Reduces "Overly Promotional" News Feed Posts

Facebook has announced that starting January 2015, it would begin decreasing the number of brands’ organic, or unpaid, posts that it considers “overly promotional” on the social network’s News Feed.  The change wouldn't affect entire brands’ posts, only the ones that fit a certain criteria. According to the social networking website, surveyed users determined that the following characteristics of posts were deemed too promotional:

  1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
  2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
  3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
Examples of these posts include:





A Facebook spokeswoman explained that the company’s algorithm will assess the promotional posts with the same filters it puts on ads.  Facebook will check how many people will engage or hide the ad to determine whether to allow these posts on people’s news feeds. This change is the latest move by Facebook to maintain quality control on the best content that is projected on News Feeds so that users will still continue to check the social network.

The number of advertisements that appear on a News Feed will not decrease, but the content will be more relevant to each individual’s tastes.  With this organic content change, Facebook is intelligently paving the way for increased advertising spending on the platform to compensate for the decrease in unpaid posts. By increasing advertising demand but not space, marketers could see the price of Facebook ads rise in the future, driving future profits for the company.


No comments: