Facebook Declares They’re Cutting Off Businesses, Brands & Media from News Feed for Good
Earlier today, Facebook announced the end of the Facebook News Feed as we know it.
In a Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg today wrote: “recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments [from friends and family] that lead us to connect more with each other.”
Explaining however, that recently “video and other public content have exploded on Facebook … [and] since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other.”
Zuckerberg even acknowledged mental health issues associated with the news feed stating: “We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being…the research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good.”
He then describes upcoming changes to the Facebook news feeddesigned to “[change] the news feed algorithm to surface relevant content that facilitates meaningful social interactions among your friends and family.”
Facebook determines which status updates you’ll see and in what order they appear in your news feed, by calculating an engagement ranking score for each post.
Currently, this algorithm optimizes for time-spent-on-site and looks at other engagement metrics such as “likes”, clicks, comments and shares of posts. They want you to be glued to Facebook, essentially.
Going forward, the weightings of signals in the news feed algorithm will change dramatically. Posts from family and friends will be much more prominent, and posts from publisher pages will be suppressed, possibly by as much as 5x..
As for the future of the Facebook news feed, Zuckerberg states users will see “less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media” and that he expects “the time people spend on Facebook … will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”
Facebook Ads do not appear to be directly impacted by these changes, but it could cause changes in the supply and demand for ads, which impacts ad prices.
What do you think about the changes to the news feed pretty much everyone uses every day? Join the discussion here or on my Linkedin page