Facebook Algorithm Tweak
If you have a Facebook page, you may have noticed that your reach and engagement stats have been down these last couple of weeks.
That’s because Facebook recently tweaked their algorithm, and for businesses, the news is not good. This particular update focuses on family and friends:
Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family. 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 if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down. To help make sure you don’t miss the friends and family posts you are likely to care about, we put those posts toward the top of your News Feed. We learn from you and adapt over time. For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, we’ll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won’t miss what she posted while you were away. –via Facebook Newsroom
So, while that’s good news for those of us who primarily use Facebook personally, for those of us who are trying to use Facebook to market our businesses, it’s probably not good news, unless you have a lot of family and friends that have Liked your page, and are sharing, commenting on, and liking your content.
Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts. We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends. –via Facebook Newsroom
With Facebook, it’s been “Pay to Play” for a while, now. But with this latest tweak, it seems like it’s going to be even more so, and, in a move that really is caused by them having a monopoly, it looks like Facebook’s ad prices are also rising.
It’s pretty dismal news.
Read more:
7 Ways Facebook’s Big Algorithm Change Will Affect Marketers and Publishers
Will Facebook’s new algorithm destroy its relationships with brands?
How Will Facebook’s Latest Algorithm Update Affect Marketers?
New Pages Update
A few weeks ago, I was in class, and one of my students called me over to her computer. She showed me a Facebook page unlike any I’d seen before. The lines were clean, it looked really nice, actually. My guess was, Facebook was rolling out a new Pages design.
Sure enough, yesterday morning I got up, and all of my Facebook pages looked different. If yours do not yet, they will soon.
There are several big changes:
- The profile pic is no longer floating over your cover image. It will now live over in the left margin, on its own. I like this–no more blocking out the cover image with the profile pic.
- The main menu is easier to find. Instead of your main navigation now being horizontally below your cover image (with only room for 4 items), it’s now positioned vertically below the profile pic on the left. This means you now have room for all of your menu items–yay!
- CTA buttons are now where the menu items used to be. Your “Like,” “Message,” and “more” buttons are now just below the cover image, and the CTA button is larger and stands out more.
Overall, this is a really positive change. The design is much cleaner, and I like it a lot.
