Facebook is Changing - What this Means for Digital Marketing

Here's the original NYtimes articles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/facebook-news-feed-changes.html?_r=0

At my company, we rely heavily on Fbook and Instagram to drive significant traffic to our e-commerce website.  We have noticed over the past two years that Fbook has significant de-prioritized organic content from appearing in their News Feed.  With the announced changes, I did a little more digging into what this means for us as a brand.  The Facebook team has confirmed that they will be changing the News Feed portion of the platform to feature more posts from ‘personal’ accounts rather than pages.

In the coming year, Facebook may decide to split the news feed into “personal” posts from friends and a secondary “explore” tab, where non-promoted posts from Facebook pages will be placed in a secondary feed. It is commented by many that promoted posts will keep their place on the main feed, requiring the need to pay to reach Facebook followers. 

Facebook’s head of its News Feed Team mentioned that those who want to still see posts from their favorite brands will, however, still be able to through prioritizing the pages (and friends) whose posts they are most interested in. Posts regarding conversations stemming from live videos, celebrities’ posts, private groups and other highly interactive posts will also still be among those highlighted on the news feed.

They have not announced a set date of when this change will take place but when it does, it will likely have a noticeable affect on page reach.  While this looks big and sounds big, there are some ambiguities as far as how far reaching this change will be. Publisher and user content may be split up in different ways than Facebook had originally experimented, and the impact may not be as drastic. However, there is no concrete information to share.

It is too soon to tell how my company will need to alter its Facebook strategy in order to remain successful on the platform. One way we can plan to begin to counter this is to start adding "Calls to Share" where we can. Another easy fix is to insure the use of engaging featured images and video clips with welcoming headlines.

Additionally, I think that we are going to have to move towards more long-form textual content and video content to drive engagement.  Engagement seems key to the algorithm.  We'll have to move from a hard sell to a soft sell.