In recent years, Facebook became the world’s leading social media platform and we became completely dependent on it. From information that affects our clothing purchases, to links to news and events in the country and beyond, to debates on political and social issues – everything can be found in one place and people have gotten digitally lazy.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook’s CEO announced major changes to Facebook’s News Feed a month ago. He said its 2 billion users will see less public content from brands, businesses and media. The goal is to bring people together through meaningful posts from friends and family. This is the second major update Facebook is making since last year when they’ve been working to reduce fake news and clickbait.
In 2018, Facebook will prioritize three features:
• News that the community rates as trustworthy
• News that people find informative
• Local news that is relevant to where people live.
However, what does this mean for the brand and companies and what are the impacts?
With these updates, the brand and businesses will notice that the reach, video watch time and referral traffic on their pages will decrease. The impact will vary from page to page, depending on the type of content they produce and how people will interact with it. The Pages with the biggest decline will be those that post posts that people don’t react to or comment on.
Businesses no longer consider “organic reach” because fewer people see their content. They have already sponsored your posts for increased visibility and reach. Advertising will become more expensive even though the advertising algorithm will remain the same. You’ll need to focus more on quality versus quantity of posts, campaigns versus daily communication, and paid versus organic reach. Now is the time to focus on Google and your website, as well as activate other communication channels. We place special emphasis on Instagram as a social media platform that is constantly growing and behaves like Facebook behaved in the golden age. Let’s not forget that Instagram is owned by Facebook and it is not known how it will be in the future.
According to Facebook, the groups will have a greater role due to the possibility of promoting debates and discussions. But through groups you will not be able to generate visits to your website. It remains to be seen how things will develop in this regard.
Our opinion is that brands and businesses will adapt very quickly to this update, while the media will go through a turbulent process because they are much more dependent on Facebook. It’s easier for brands because they can develop a strategy that will include other communication channels, Facebook notwithstanding. The situation is different with the media. Facebook published new filtering systems where users will determine which media is relevant.