Unpacking Facebook’s Latest Algorithm Changes and their Potential Impact on Your Business

Slightly more than a year ago, Facebook unveiled changes to its News Feed that favored personal posts from friends rather than content from brand Pages. Publishers and businesses, which relied heavily on the News Feed for content visibility, now found their posts relegated to the lower echelons of the algorithm. Now, Facebook has announced further plans to intensify this focus, filling the News Feed with yet more posts from family members, further diminishing the reach of celebrities and brands.

The social media behemoth expressed in a statement, “Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family. As we say in our News Feed values, that is still the driving principle of News Feed today. Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why today, we’re announcing an upcoming change to News Feed ranking to help make sure you don’t miss stories from your friends.”

Facebook admitted that Pages could expect to see decreased visits due to these changes, which may frustrate publishers who largely depend on Facebook referrals for their website traffic. On the flip side, this could present a fresh source of revenue for Facebook, as Pages may consider ramping up their advertising spend to maintain visibility among followers. However, Facebook also risks Pages reducing the amount of content they post on the platform. As part of an effort to ensure more authentic Page Likes, the company began removing Likes from inactive, voluntarily deactivated, or memorialized accounts last year, which saw some Pages losing overall followers.

Despite these changes, Pages with a substantial number of Likes or a large audience sharing content will not be overly affected. Those followers will continue to see and share content, thus exposing their own social networks to the content. The ambiguity, however, arises in defining what constitutes a “substantial” number. As a result, this could pose challenges for smaller publishers struggling to match the reach of industry giants.

According to USA Today, “Publishers and news outlets, who rely on Facebook users to click on their content and generate ad revenue, may suffer the most with the change. Media sites reported more than 40% of their web traffic came from Facebook, according to analytics firm Parse.ly, while 30% of U.S. adults get their news directly from Facebook, Pew Research Center reported.”

Perhaps surprising to some, the algorithm changes might also serve a disservice to Facebook users themselves. The Information reported that the sharing of personal news, as opposed to news articles or Internet memes, fell 21% year over year as of mid-2015. Although Facebook countered, saying the overall sharing levels remained consistent with previous years, these changes could result in fewer personal posts. As more mature users increasingly rely on Facebook and Twitter for news and updates, a lack of such content could potentially lead to decreased activity — or worse, attrition. However, it seems that Facebook’s strategy may bank on retaining younger users who may favor more personal content sharing platforms like Snapchat and Facebook’s own Instagram.