The day many marketers and publishers have dreaded has arrived: Facebook is changing its algorithm to send less traffic to content sites. In a blog post this morning, the social giant announced that it will increasingly prioritize posts shared by friends and family over those from publishers, brands and other pages. “The growth and competition in the publisher ecosystem is really, really strong,” Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management at Facebook, told The New York Times. "We're concerned that many people using Facebook may also not be able to connect with friends and family because of this." The movement is not a total shock.
Research conducted by Social Flow earlier this month found that publisher article reach had already dropped by 42%. Facebook image masking service doesn't announce its algorithm changes unless they have a big impact, and this one will. After all, 40% of publisher traffic comes from Facebook, according to a recent study by analytics firm Parse.ly. Advertising Continue reading below I spend my life obsessing over Facebook's impact on marketing and media. As this news broke this morning, seven big thoughts came to mind: 1. It will affect publishers As you may have seen on Twitter, there is an easy way to minimize the algorithm change.
If posts from “friends and family” get top rankings in News Feed, editors just need to ask those people to share their stories. But if you're a publisher with a massive Facebook presence like BuzzFeed or Vox, one of the main reasons people share your stories on Facebook in the first place is because they see them in their News Feed after you post. . In other words, publishers' Facebook posts are the seed that grows into a giant tree of traffic. (BuzzFeed's Pound Technology is a great example of how this works.) Fewer seeds means much, much less traffic. 2. Publishers will need to track marketers and pay for traffic When Facebook reduced brand reach on Facebook three years ago, marketers went through the algorithm's seven stages of grief.