Three Major Shift On Facebook News feed Starting In 2018

Earlier this week, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg made a big announcement on how the Facebook's news feed algorithm change in terms of prioritizing our friends & families share information than article/publishers' content.

Here's why

Over the years, many users has noticed that their newsfeed has been flooded with article/ads from brands and publishers rather than their friends & families' update due to explosive Increased in brands/publishers' update. 

This defeat the purpose on why Facebook is built, which is to strengthen connection amongst friend & family members as stated in Mark Zuckerberg's post on Thursday.

"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 friends and family at the core of the experience"

Here's my top 3 prediction on how this will Impact brand & publisher.

1. Expect to spend more on both Facebook Ads & organic post

By changing the algorithm to favor friends & family's post, It means less post from brands & publishers but the number of post from brands & publishers will Increase nevertheless due to more and more brands on Facebook.

When demand (brands' post) > supply (Facebook News Feed slot), this will definitely drastically increase the auction tension and lead to a higher price per post since there will always be some cash rich advertiser willing to pay more to grab user's attention.

2. Facebook User Time Spent On Facebook Will Decreased

As current Facebook user's behavior is formed with stick with brands/publishers' video (The 9gag jokes, The dog, cat meme, The cooking recipe, The where place got a new cafe, The what brand got a new promo,etc) With less of this Information to be consume, user time spent on Facebook will eventually decrease.

With the decrease time span on Facebook, this will lead to even more Intense competition on News Feed's slot for brand's & publishers.

3. Brand's Facebook Fans Is More Powerful Than Ever

When Facebook prioritize friends & family member's post It doesn't mean just your friends' "Who wanna get some lunch together?" post. It means anything that your friends shared on Facebook.

What this means is that, If your brand post something that is appealing to your fans and one of your fans shared the news on their News Feed, the post could potentially reach more users/fan's friend than ever.

How to adapt this changes?

1. Be more relevant.

When it comes to Facebook Ads, there is a metric call "relevance score" which use to govern how much advertiser should pay for each post they advertise. The higher the relevance score, the lesser the advertiser need to pay for each post.

The algorithm that use to calculate the score is still a black box but from the actual data that most advertiser noticed is that, the more engage the user with the ads (likes, comments, takes action), the higher the post's relevance score and the lower each post need to pay.

Stop boosting promotion 10% off post, focus more on how the product can improve the user's life post.

Stay relevant to the users.

2. Engage more with your current Facebook fans

A brand should never act like a robot but more human.

You will never see a boring standard reply or post from brand goes viral, however, any brand that has more human side of it & sense of humour will definitely capture their fans' heart and encourage them to share your brand post on their News Feed.

Remember, you fans' post is now more powerful than ever.

3. Focus your advertising dollar on those who matter

Since now you know that each post's cost more than ever, you don't want to spend your advertising cost on those who don't matter, understand your customers/Facebook fans in a deeper level, what common interest they have? which other Facebook page they liked? which celebrity they follow? which other brand they use?

Use any information you have on your fans to narrow down your advertising campaigns/ads target audience, get the most bang out of each buck.

However, there is a great debate over advertising industry now since there is some advertiser noticed that broad targeting works best (a campaign that target no specific interest) and to let Facebook AI machine do what their best, find the most suitable audience.

This strategy depends heavily on what you selling and I would suggest you try both targeting to find out which way work best for your brand if possible.

Thanks for reading.

  #digitalmarketing #marketing #business #google #facebook

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p/s: A new update from the Facebook Southeast Asia's representative has confirmed that this changes WILL NOT affect paid advertising but with no confirmation/written notice on this piece of information yet, will continue to follow up any update here. Peace.