Facebook Tweaked its News Feed, and it's Bad News for Publishers

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Like everyone else, you probably noticed that Facebook brand pages are suddenly getting a lot less traffic. And this is bad news. You are probably quite upset about it and if you are using Facebook for marketing or for promoting your site and work, you are probably very disappointed. The truth is that Facebook recently tweaked its news feed algorithm and it hurts.

Also Read: Artificial Intelligence on Facebook?

Earlier this month, Facebook changed the algorithm that determines which “stories” show up on the News Feed. The change is supposed to rank stories in the news feed according to how much your friends have been clicking on them. But that is not all, Facebook want more “high quality articles” and less of “the latest meme.” Why? Because Facebook wants to become the “newspaper” of social media.

Stories in the news feed are now ranked by how much your friends have been clicking on them. #facebook

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The Business Insider confirms that Facebook has taken a grip on “memes”

[quote style=”boxed”]When the change went down, lots of people assumed it would be terrible news for publishers that write a lot about “memes” and publish other “viral” content – publishers like Buzzfeed and Upworthy. Then AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac reported that the Facebook executive in charge of News Feed, Chris Cox, has a personal distaste for those two sites. [/quote]

A week or so after Facebook made its changes, one social media marketing agency, Ignite, analyzed 689 posts from 21 brand pages. Ignite found that in just one week, the number of people who saw posts from those brands declined by 44% on average, “with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%.”

The number of people seeing posts declined by 44% on average. #facebook

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Why did Facebook do that?

Because despite the “Facebook is free and it always will be” stamped by Mark Zuckerberg, this is only true for Facebook vital asset: users. Yes, this does not apply to businesses.

Post by Facebook.

Think about it, what are Facebook pages for businesses and publishers? I will tell you: they are free ads! And Facebook has no interest in providing businesses with free promotion. Facebook lives out of advertising, Facebook needs businesses to spend money on advertising.

Yes, it is a complex mix between gratuity for end-users, interesting content (so that users come back), and making a profitable business (so it keeps on growing, on offering more and staying free for end-users), see the the pattern?

Despite all these, I still believe Facebook is a great platform to promote your business and help your site get traffic, whether you decide to use ads or not. Whatever yo do, Facebook will always be a good thing for your business, it will always do more good than bad.

And this is not the end of it, Facebook is before everything a very intelligent company which never fears to go back on decision that did not work as plan.