Facebook News Feed Update: What does it mean for your business?

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You can’t have missed it in the (online marketing) news lately. Due to a large-scale update, Facebook is undergoing major changes that will have effect on individuals, companies and marketeers. With this update, Facebook wants to ensure that users will get more meaningful social interactions on the social platform and lose less time with endless passive scrolling the timeline, watching videos and reading articles. This means that news from your family, friends and groups is given priority over sponsored and public content. Facebook users will happily welcome the change. Companies and marketeers will be less excited.

These changes obviously raise questions. How big will the impact be? Which strategy should we use from now on Facebook?  Has Facebook marketing changed forever?

But what is exactly going to change?

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wants to shift the goal of the Facebook News Feed from ‘finding and offering relevant content’ to ‘enabling social experiences’. Zuckerberg wants to achieve that users spend their time usefully on Facebook. However, the preference for updates from friends, family and groups does not mean that branded content will disappear altogether. It simply gets a less prominent position in your timeline.

The other goal Zuckerburg wants to achieve with the update is that the news that reach your timeline come from a reliable source. To establish this, Facebook surveyed its users in order to determine which news channels are regarded as trusted and respected. Highly rated news pages are rewarded with an increase in reach, while pages that are considered not-reliable can expect a drop in audience reach. Fake news will slowly disappear from Facebook.

Zuckerberg also wants to get rid of engagement bait on your timeline. Engagement bait is the evoking of followers and other Facebook users to liking, sharing or commenting on a message with the goals of engaging more fans to your organization. It occurs in various forms like vote baiting, react baiting, share baiting, tag baiting, share baiting and comment baiting.

different types of engagement baitDifferent types of engagement bait. Source: Facebook Newsroom 

Facebook wants to avoid this kind of content on your timeline and will start punished pages that do this with lower reach on the post and future posts and wants to use machine learning to identify and ban engagement bait from your timeline. At this very moment, thousands of posts are being reviewed and categorized by Facebook to detect and identify the different types of engagement bait. All to improve the overall user experience

As a company, it is incredibly important to anticipate to the changes of Facebook to stay ahead of your competitors and to maintain your position on the timeline of your target group. By gathering your reach organically with the use of content that your target group wants to see, you can ensure that your posts receive high priority in the news feed and increase in reach.

So stay tuned!

Local over international

Given the large global use of Facebook, it is clear that these changes will have a major impact on international online marketing. Facebook plans to give local news higher priority on the news feed to better respond to the needs of the (local) user. Facebook wants to ensure that the users are being informed about what’s happening in their local community and will connect stronger with the the local environment.

Facebook reinforces yet again the importance of local online marketing with the update. So: Think global, act local! If you want to cross the borders successfully with your business, a local approach is inevitable!

Alexander Jungnitsch