The beginning of the new year often signifies change for many, and Facebook is no exception. In fact, just last week, co-founder and CEO of the social media giant announced a significant update to the platform that is creating a seismic shift for brands, advertisers and marketers.
The announcement, which has received a multitude of responses since its release, stated that a change to the current algorithm will be implemented, focusing on bringing back the “social” in social media and removing “news” from the News Feed. Instead the algorithm will begin favouring engaging and meaningful posts from friends and family over branded messages. As expected, many brands are fearful about the implications that this update will have on their marketing communications via the platform, however, it’s not all bad news.
Since it’s beginning, Facebook has had its fair share of public scrutiny due the ease and simplicity to distribute fake news on the platform, as well as offensive and abusive conduct from users. However, Facebook was never intended to be a platform where users could access their news or for Facebook marketing purposes, instead, the social media behemoth had the mission to bring the world closer together.
Therefore, in an attempt to get back to basics and clean up the platform, Facebook announced an update to the current algorithm which promises to promote “meaningful interactions” suggesting that posts from friends and family will be increasingly visible in comparison to content distributed by brands. In fact, due to the amount of public content disseminated by brands through Facebook, the platform has vastly shifted away from what it originally set out to do, with Mark Zuckerberg himself stating that, “we built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put our friends and family at the core of the experience.”
So what does this algorithm update mean for your brand? Undoubtedly, the update will impact your brand’s metrics in the short term, but it also provides a well-timed opportunity to revisit your current social media strategies and improve them, focusing on creating exceptional, engaging and creative content that encourages engagement through conversation and discussion in comparison to chasing what Facebook describes as meaningless and passive likes and shares.
In saying this, some brands have already experienced the negative impacts of the changes. For example, one brand had a decrease of 96% on their engagement from the previous week, while another brand experienced a 50% reduction in their engagement. Inevitably, this shows that organic traffic will be largely affected, further reinforcing the need for compelling creative that provokes conversation over likes in order to still be visible. In fact, business and technology publisher, The Hustle, states that the algorithm which is centred around the idea of meaningful interaction means that branded messages that successfully create conversations and experiences will still be visible in news feed.
Meanwhile, the social media giant also stated that visibility and engagement for paid advertising through the platform will remain largely unaffected in relation to this update. However, in stating this, experts also suggest that the algorithm update will cause CPM’s to increase due to a demand for ad inventory to cement the likelihood for visibility.
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