Facebook Newsfeed Changes & What That Means For You

So on January Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced some pretty significant changes to how the will view and treat your news feed going forward.  This will have major consequences for you as a content creating business owner.  These changes have been on the card for a while so shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to us.

In any case I thought I would create this post to help answer the following questions for you as a business owner who markets their business using Facebook:

1. How will these changes affect my business page?
2. How does this affect my Facebook posts?
3. Is this the death of Facebook marketing?
4. What does this mean mean for the type of posts I create, when I post, the frequency etc?
5. How does this affect Facebook advertising?

So what I am going to do is post Mark Z’s post in it’s entirety below:

One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.

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. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.

But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.

It’s easy to understand how we got here. Video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years. 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.

We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being. So we’ve studied this trend carefully by looking at the academic research and doing our own research with leading experts at universities.

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.

Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.

We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.

As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.

For example, there are many tight-knit communities around TV shows and sports teams. We’ve seen people interact way more around live videos than regular ones. Some news helps start conversations on important issues. But too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.

Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.

At its best, Facebook has always been about personal connections. By focusing on bringing people closer together — whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world — we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent.

Here are some of the important excerpts from that post that have caught my eye ( I actually Bolded and underlined them above too):

• Facebook is time well spent
• friends and family at the core of the experience
• public content is crowding out the personal moments
• passively reading articles or watching videos may not be as good
• I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions
• expect to see more from your friends, family and groups
• you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people
• people interact way more around live videos than regular ones

So below is my video commentary on Mark Z’s statement:

I also want to include a video from Facebook that further explains their changes.  Take a moment to watch it and really pay attention to the words used:

Here are some of the important excerpts from that video that have caught my attention:

• Deeper more meaningful interactions with people you care about,
• Explain the Facebook ranking system,
• They will determine if posts are between person & person or person and page,
• Person to person is more valuable than page to person,
• People in your network will get the biggest boost,
• Over time you’ll see more posts from people you’re connected too and less from content from publishers,
• They will prioritize interactions that take more time and care…i.e. thoughtful and longer comments and engagement.

And here is my final video on the impact it will have on your marketing going forward:

This is a fantastic article from wired magazine featuring an interview with Adam Mosseri — check it out.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-adam-mosseri-on-why-youll-see-less-video-more-from-friends/

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions ok?

To Your Success

Kenneth