Facebook algorithm change rocks brand marketers and publishers

Didit Editorial

8 years ago

June 29, 2016: Facebook rocked the publishing and brand marketing world today when it published a document warning that publishers and brands should expect reduced referrals from Facebook in the future:

Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.

The reason for this warning was a change in Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that will assign more weight to posts from friends and associates than news publishers or brands the user has Liked or otherwise interacted with. This change – according to Facebook – was made in response to user unhappiness due to their feeds being overcrowded from non-friend originating messages:

We’ve heard from our community that people are still worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about. For people with many connections this is particularly important, as there are a lot of stories for them to see each day. So we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed.

So far, the reactions from publishers – who have becoming dependent on Facebook’s referral traffic for survival, has been worried. In the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo wrote:

Though it is couched in the anodyne language of a corporate news release, the document’s message should come as a shock to everyone in the media business. According to these values, Facebook has a single overriding purpose, and it isn’t news. Facebook is mainly for telling you what’s up with your friends and family.

Put another way, unless your sister works at Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, or the New York Times, your odds at seeing any posts from these entities just got longer. On the other hand, the chance that you’ll see a cute cat pic from your brother just got much better.

Whether any of this is good for the world is up for debate. As Casey Newton wrote in The Verge (a publication that has suffered significant traffic loss as a result of Facebook’s prior news feed algo changes), Facebook’s change isn’t going to make people any smarter of better-informed:

My takeaway is that while Facebook is committed to users feeling informed, it’s not interested in whether they’re actually informed. The company asks people who get their news from Facebook whether they feel informed by stories, for example, but it does not quiz them to see what knowledge they have retained… the perfect News Feed ought to do more than give you a fuzzy sense of satisfaction that you are more “informed.” It should actually, measurably make you smarter about the world around you. And on that subject, here in the 1 percent days, Facebook remains stubbornly indifferent.

What this means for marketers
Brands – like publishers – will suffer from this change unless their posts are shared by individuals known to the individual Facebook user. One way to get around this problem is to boost posts, but this, of course, can be highly expensive at scale.

Another way to deal with it is to create posts that are more share-worthy, but this too can be expensive, because users are inundated with commercial messages already, meaning that brands may have to offer more than simply an interesting post to earn a share. Coupons and other discounted offers are popular shareable items, but these are, of course, discounts that will reduce profitability.

It’s not unthinkable that Facebook’s new algo change – because it elevates the user’s friends into the role of messaging gatekeeper — will create an underground “pay to share” market in which Facebook’s users will be approached (outside of Facebook) to selectively share brand posts in exchange for some iota of under-the-table financial compensation, a scheme widely used in the shadier parts of the Influencer Marketing industry. Ultimately, however such schemes are both likely illegal (per the FTC’s rules against “organic” messages that are in fact paid), and quite probably easily detectable via Facebook (given that it knows so much about the behavior of its users).

It’s also possible that Facebook – which has always acknowledged that its News Feed algorithm is a gigantic “work in progress,” will decide in a few months to swing the pendulum the other way, in favor of “higher quality content” designed not just to make the user “feel informed,” but in a way that actually results in a better-informed user.

While nobody knows how the tension between Facebook’s dual roles as news source and “feel good” friend network will be resolved, it’s safe to say that Facebook will be monitoring user engagement and organic share metrics very carefully in the next days and weeks.

Whether or not it listens to the many news publishers whose bottom lines are likely to be hurt by this latest change is anybody’s guess, but it’s highly unlikely that these publishers will stay quiet about the pain they’re being forced to go through. The result of this will likely be a larger discussion about Facebook’s role – as friend, foe, or frenemy, of the fourth estate – upon which the survival of a healthy democracy depends.