26 Aug Your Facebook’s Newsfeed will be changing…again
Facebook, is a place where people want to see and share things that matter most to them but, for quite a while now, our newsfeeds were getting more and more populated by posts from publishing companies rather than family and friends.
This has prompted Facebook to change their algorithm in order to push more posts shared by those we care about the most, and to give less importance to what publishing companies want to push.
This is bad news for publishing companies like online newspapers.
Following this change, publishing companies, such as online newspapers, are expecting to get less reach and less referrals from their posts to their websites, which, will automatically result in less money being made through advertising.
The relationship between publishers and Facebook has always been strained – Zuckerberg’s company keeps changing its rules whilst publishers became more and more dependent on traffic from Facebook.
44% of most publishing site visits come as referred traffic from Facebook. This means that Facebook controls the user experience and much of the revenue and user data.
What Facebook has done this time is a stark reminder to publishers that they do not own the user. This is not the first time Facebook has sent out this message. A few months ago, Zynga, close partner of Facebook, experienced a significant loss after Facebook implemented changes on how its gaming-related content appeared on users’ newsfeeds.
Publishing industry insiders know however, that if users share their posts with friends, their traffic won’t be affected that much because posts that are shared with family and friends are treated as personal posts considered to be interesting to the user.
This means that we should start expecting to see more incentives from publishing houses to share content with friends and family. We’ll just have to wait and see just how far they will be willing to go not to lose that precious traffic.
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