WebProNews

Tag: news feed

  • More Stats On The Facebook Organic Reach Decline

    There’s been a lot of discussion about the widespread drop in organic Facebook Page post reach, and this week, EdgeRank Checker put out some more data to back up the bitter reality for brands.

    According to its findings (via TechCrunch), the typical Page last month say organic reach per fan of 6.51%, fan reach per fan of 6.46%, and viral reach per fan of 0.99%. For comparison, organic reach per fan was 16% in February of 2012. Last September it was 12.60%. It’s been already nearly cut in half since then.

    Ogilvy recently supplied a similar picture:

    A recent report from Valleywag indicates organic page reach will reach as little as one or two percent.

    “Many different types of businesses are still doing very well on Facebook, even in terms of Reach. We’re starting to see that brands who naturally do well in social media are performing stronger than brands that traditionally struggle,” says EdgeRank Checker. “For example, artists/musicians/entertainers/movies are experiencing average Organic Reach well above their news feed competitors like retail/clothing/bank/appliances.”

    Tell that to actor Rainn WIlson. He recently tweeted, “Turns out my @Facebook is kind of worthless. I used to post & reach most of my 200k followers, now I reach 5k & have to pay to hit more.”

    “There are still brands that are leveraging Facebook quite effectively, especially by leveraging things like Shares, and encouraging people to Organically discuss/promote their content (think Old Spice),” EdgeRank Checker says. “Interestingly, Viral Reach per Fan is up to 1.10% (0.60% in Feb 2013). Facebook is giving additional exposure to content that it deems ‘Viral.’ If this number had significantly decreased, or approached 0—we would be concerned that Facebook was even further squeezing brands. However, this does not seem to be the case.”

    Things might be going fine for those Pages that Facebook has deemed to be “quality” sources. As comments from Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom suggest, its algorithm pretty much only looks at source when determining the quality of content.

    Images via EdgerankChecker, Ogilvy

  • Rainn Wilson Finds Facebook Worthless After Organic Reach Drop

    Actor Rainn Wilson appears to be among the many people frustrated about Facebook’s controversial killing of organic reach for Facebook Page posts.

    In case you haven’t heard, it’s getting harder and harder for Pages to reach their audience without paying. Meanwhile, Facebook says the total Pages liked by typical users grew over 50% last year.

    The tweet is over a week old, but it was pointed out in a few articles related to Eat24’s “break-up” with Facebook, including a new one on the subject from TechCrunch.

    While it sucks for Wilson, at least other Page owners can take some comfort that not even Dwight Schrute is immune to Facebook’s algorithm.

    Image via YouTube

  • Facebook: Total Pages Liked By Typical Users Grew Over 50% Last Year

    As you may know, organic reach for Facebook Page posts is no a rapid decline. Common thinking is simply that Facebook wants you to pay for your visibility.

    Josh Constine at TechCrunch spoke with Facebook’s head of News Feed, and was told that the total number of Pages liked by the typical Facebook user grew over 50% lsat year.

    Facebook’s whole angle is that it has to keep the News Feed interesting for users, and that if they show every post from every Page, users will become bored because they’ll see too many promotional posts, which will drown out more meaningful posts from friends and other things they really care about.

    All of this assumes that Facebook can really determine what you actually care about. An algorithm is deciding what you should see.

    It’s not that Facebook doesn’t have a point, but it also assumes that users can’t decide for themselves what content they like. It assumes that users would as soon stop visiting Facebook as unlike Pages that were giving them too much content they didn’t want to see. Let’s not forget that users went out of their way to like these Pages for a reason. Typically that reason is because they want to see content from them. Doesn’t the fact that people are liking more Pages on Facebook indicate they want to see posts from those pages?

    Either way, brands are getting fed up. Eat24 caused a scene this this week with a public “break-up” letter to Facebook, and left the social network after building up 70,000 fans. It remains to be seen if a significant amount of others will follow, but many are certainly at the very least considering it.

    Users who miss getting updates from Pages can perhaps go through their likes and do some pruning. Reduce the number of Page you actually like, and you’re likely to see more from the ones that you do like. There’s always the “Pages Feed,” but there’s no guarantee you’ll see everything there either. Right now, some of the top posts in mine are from two and three days ago. Your best bet is probably to organize the Pages you want to keep up with into Interest lists.

    Image via Facebook

  • Popular Brand Leaves Facebook, Will Others Follow?

    Could we be seeing the beginning of a brand revolt against Facebook? Facebook is so huge, that it’s unlikely that it will amount to a mass exodus, but the tensions between brands and Facebook seem to be approaching a boiling point. At least one has had enough, and has left Facebook.

    Would you ever consider shutting down your Facebook presence? Let us know in the comments.

    We’re talking about a brand that had over 70,000 likes, so it’s not exactly a nobody. Eat24 wrote a “break-up letter” to the social network expressing the same frustrations we’re hearing every day now. Facebook is killing organic reach, and is forcing brands to pay for exposure after years of serving as an invaluable way for anyone to build a following and get messages to fans for free.

    Here are a few samples from the letter:

    …your algorithm is saying most of our friends don’t care about sushi porn, that they aren’t interested in hearing our deepest thoughts about pizza toppings. Are you listening to yourself? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? You know that all those people clicked ‘Like’ on our page because it’s full of provocatively posed burritos and cheese puns, right?

    …

    Truth be told, your actions make us feel like you don’t respect us….All we do is give, and all you do is take. We give you text posts, delicious food photos, coupons, restaurant recommendations… and what do you do in return? You take them and you hide them from all our friends. Maybe you steal our random musings about pork buns and claim them as your own. Guess we’ll never know.

    …

    Even if we could figure out your mysterious, all-knowing algorithm, it’s constantly changing, so what works today might not work tomorrow. Posting something that most of our friends see is like biting into a burrito and actually getting all seven layers…never gonna happen. The point is, you’re wasting our time and cock-blocking food porn from our friends. Not cool, Facebook, not cool.

    But the bigger picture issue is that we can’t trust you. You lied to us and said you were a social network but you’re totally not a social network. At least not anymore. When we log in to Facebook, we want to see what Aunt Judy is doing next weekend (hopefully baking us cupcakes) and read hilarious headlines from The Onion and see pictures of a cat who got his head stuck in the couch cushions.

    You get the idea. Hell, you’re probably going through something similar (unless you’re Buzzfeed or a few other white-listed sites that Facebook has deemed to be of “quality”).

    Eat24 said it would delete its Facebook presence at 11:59 P.M. on Monday night. Sure enough, it’s gone. If you search for it on Facebook, it shows up in the results preview, but when you click on it, you’re simply redirected to the homepage.

    Facebook’s Brandon McCormick responded to the letter by saying: “Hey Eat24, this is Brandon over at Facebook. I was bummed to read your letter. The world is so much more complicated than when we first met – it has changed. And we used to love your jokes about tacquitos and 420 but now they don’t seem so funny. There is some serious stuff happening in the world and one of my best friends just had a baby and another one just took the best photo of his homemade cupcakes and what we have come to realize is people care about those things more than sushi porn (but if we are in the mood for it, we know where to find it Eat24!). So we are sorry that we have to part this way because we think we could still be friends – really we do. But we totally respect you if you need some space.”

    So, Facebook’s response to brands is basically, “Oh, you don’t like it? That sucks. See you later.” You have to wonder if that would be the case if a substantial number of brands did the same thing Eater24 is doing. I don’t expect that to actually happen, but what would Facebook do?

    Facebook wants to be a newspaper, apparently. At least that’s what everyone keeps saying, and some of their recent moves have reflected that. But being a source of news for consumers is a by-product of what Facebook started out as – a social network. A way to connect people (which just happened to include brands). Now it seems to be more about trying to dictate what content it thinks people should be consuming (regardless of whether or not it comes from Pages that users have actually “liked”). To be fair, Facebook has said in the past that it’s “not a social network”.

    As mentioned, Eat24 had over 70,000 Facebook likes, and over 2,000 of them liked the post about dropping Facebook. It was interesting to read the comments on that.

    Christy Cannariato, for example, said, “As the administrator of a page for a nonprofit — hello, no budget for promoting posts, FB! — I applaud you and understand exactly what you’re talking about. I am a regular customer of Eat24 but never once had one of your posts come into my newsfeed….until this one. Got all your tweets, though!”

    Yes, the more Facebook shuts brands out of the News Feed, the more Twitter stands to gain. Hopefully Twitter won’t follow a similar path.

    Tim Skellenger wrote, ” I hope more companies join this and Facebook gets the message! Small business owners, musicians and many other entities rely on building our fan base so that we can ACTUALLY communicate with our fans. If we wanted to buy advertising we would. We already paid, we paid with all our time put into gaining followers for years and years.”

    Jon Krop wrote, “I’ll keep using your service regardless of you being on Facebook or not . In fact I usually just use your App or go directly to your site when I’m hungry …probably because I rarely see your posts on my Facebook feed.”

    There’s an important point there. You can’t rely on third-parties to keep your business alive. People relied on Google for years, and found out the hard way, so now some of them are trying to build Google-proof businesses. Some, however, turned to services like Facebook and Twitter to fill the void. The problem with that is (which we’re now seeing) that these services can suddenly change the game too, and you may find yourself out of luck.

    If you can make it on your own, do it.

    Have Facebook’s News Feed algorithm changes been significantly damaging to your business? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Facebook

  • Somebody Thinks The Facebook Organic Reach Decline Is A Good Thing

    At least somebody thinks the brutal slashing of your Facebook Page’s organic reach is a good thing.

    Have you found a silver lining to Facebook showing less people your posts organically? Let us know in the comments.

    Isobar director of strategy Bryan Maleszyk wrote an article for DigiDay, saying that “brands should thank Facebook for charging them.” That’s probably not what a lot of Page owners want to hear right now as Facebook is killing their organic reach, and an interesting debate has emerged in the comments of his article.

    Maleszyk does make some interesting points, but much if it is indeed debatable. His basic premise is that you should have expected to have the free ride (organic reach) end, and that many brands have accumulated “graveyards” of fans by “dubious means” like buying likes, which are “counted, regardless of their true value to the brand.”

    I won’t attempt to sum up his entire piece. You can read it yourself, but one part I find highly debatable is when he says:

    It is Facebook’s responsibility to maintain the best user experience possible for its 1.2 billion users, so as to avoid the MySpace curse of over-advertising. If brand content continues to overwhelm the news feed with such limited engagement, the currently small trickle of user abandonment will likely turn into a torrent. And without them, Facebook offers no value.

    OK, so Facebook should avoid over-advertising by reducing the organic reach of posts from Pages that those users liked, and show those users more posts from Pages that they may or may not have liked because the Pages paid for it?

    I’m not seeing the logic on that one. Speaking strictly as a user, I want to see updates from Pages I like. That’s why I liked them. That’s the whole point, or so I thought. It bothers me that I’m not seeing the content I signed up to see. I don’t think I’m alone there. It’s not Facebook’s responsibility (at least it shouldn’t be) to determine whether or not I’m seeing too many posts or irrelevant posts from the Pages I explicitly “liked”. That should be for me to determine. If I do in fact determine that I don’t like what I’m getting from a Page that I have liked, then I would unlike it. It’s pretty simple. It works marvelously on Twitter (and I hope it never changes there).

    If you subscribe to an RSS feed, and you don’t like the content the blog is pushing out, you unsubscribe. If you get an email newsletter, and you don’t like it, then you unsubscribe. Why should liking a Facebook Page be any different?

    From the Page owner/admin’s perspective, you’re now forced to pay if you want to get any visibility whatsoever. Facebook is reportedly cutting organic reach down to 1 or 2 percent. If you start a new page, and wish to build a following by getting your early fans to engage with your posts, and potentially increase your reach that way, good luck getting more than one of those early fans to even see your posts to begin with without paying.

    What’s interesting is that Facebook seems intent on cramming your News Feed with other content, like stories from pages you haven’t even liked. It’s even testing a feature to show you the stories that you “missed” even though that just means the stories that Facebook chose not to show you in the first place. Remember when you could just see all the content from your friends and the Pages you liked? What a simpler time.

    Commenting on the DigiDay article, John writes, “What about the Facebook users who like a page because they WANT the information from that page? And the whole algorithm thing is a crock. I grew my page to 117,000, with over 200,000 ‘talking about this’ and 4,000,000 weekly reach and I did it 100% organically. Then, I advertised for one week to test how it worked. The day after the campaign stopped my reach dropped 90%.”

    ThinkBlue commented, “You kind of forgot to mention the part where Facebook already charged brands billions of dollars to buy these ‘likes’ by promising access to highly targeted, highly engaged consumers. This was the ultimate bait and switch. Why trust them now?”

    While the post appears to be aimed at bigger brands, one reader noted that for small publishers and bloggers, the whole thing can be “crushing.” In response, Maleszyk admitted that this was a good point, but then suggested that “things are looking up for publishers” on the organic side thanks to Facebook’s Paper app.

    It’s a little early in the Paper days to make anything out of that.

    It seems like there’s nothing left to do, but to play ball with Facebook, or stop relying on it for any real visibility. They did add some new targeting capabilities that will let you reach people who are similar to people who have visited your site, used your mobile app or connected to your Facebook Page.

    There are some front-end changes going on with Facebook as well, in case you haven’t noticed. Both the News Feed and Pages both have new designs (if not fully rolled out just yet).

    Gain, a Facebook marketing app, has figured out how to get the most out of your images in the new News Feed design. They put out a new infographic on the topic. I don’t know that it will do much to help you with your organic reach, but it could at least make the few posts that people do see look better.

    As far as the new Page design goes, Facebook did answer some questions businesses were having about it. Here’s what we learned from that Q&A. In the left-hand column, brick-and-mortar business Pages will feature business info like a map, phone number, business hours, likes, visits, etc., as well as videos and photos. Reviews, posts to your Page and Pages your Page likes will also appear there.

    For businesses operating primarily online, the column will show likes, info about the business, apps (if relevant), photos, videos, posts to Page and the Pages your Page likes.

    Admins will be able to rearrange the order in which any of this stuff appears, which is nice. In addition to the left-hand column, apps can appear in the top navigation menu, and admins can also rearrange the order of those.

    Pages with messages activated can view them in the Activity tab at the top of the Page, and in the This Week box on the right side.

    As you may know, the design also comes with a “Pages to Watch” feature. Facebook clarified that Pages will see when they’ve been added to lists, but they won’t know what Page added them.

    Do you like the direction Facebook is going in for marketing? How about for users? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Facebook

  • This Infographic Teaches You About Facebook’s News Feed Image Sizes

    You may have noticed some changes to the way Facebook’s News Feed looks lately. Facebook marketing app Gain has the imaging of the new design figured out, and has put together a pretty interesting infographic (via InsideFacebook) on the subject to help you get the most out of your image sharing.

    Good stuff to know.

    Unfortunately, none of this is likely to help you boost your organic reach by much.

    Image via Gain

  • Facebook Tells You You ‘Missed’ The Stories It Chose Not To Show You

    Facebook may be going out of its way to hide more content from users from Pages that they’ve liked, but they’re also testing a way to make sure those users don’t miss some of their friends’ posts.

    Inside Facebook and AllFacebook (which are both operated by MediaBistro) share the same screenshot that a reader sent them. It invites users to “Check out stories you haven’t seen yet from _____ and 39 other people,” and to “Show unread stories.”

    Choosing to show unread stories takes you to another page with the following URL: facebook.com/feed/missed_stories. You can go ahead and put that in your browser, and you’ll probably be able to view the feed.

    Interestingly, I was given at least one story that I had already seen in this feed. They are just “testing” it.

    Mostly, the feed appears to be made up of posts that Facebook itself chose not to show me in my News Feed. It wasn’t necessarily that I “missed” it. If Facebook hadn’t buried it in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have missed it at all.

    And did you notice how they got rid of the “most recent” option in the latest News Feed design?

    Image via Facebook

  • Facebook Is Reportedly About To Slash Your Page’s Organic Reach Even More

    Facebook is showing Pages’ organic posts to fewer and fewer people as time goes on.

    Have you noticed a dramatic drop in the visibility of your own posts? Let us know in the comments.

    As you may know, in December, the company pushed out an algorithm change to its News Feed, which severely impacted the organic reach for many Pages, but recent research from Ogilvy shows it was already getting bad before that, and is on a steady path downward with reach as low as 6% of Pages’ audiences by last month.

    Now, Sam Biddle at Gawker’s Valleywag is reporting that it’s about to drop even further:

    A source professionally familiar with Facebook’s marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is “in the process of” slashing “organic page reach” down to 1 or 2 percent. That would mean an advertising giant like Nike, which has spent a great deal of internet effort collecting over 16 million Facebook likes, would only be able to affect of around a 160,000 of them when it pushes out a post. Companies like Gawker, too, rely on gratis Facebook propagation for a huge amount of their audience.

    As Biddle notes, the less likes a Page has, the fewer that number will be. Good luck getting any visibility if you don’t have many.

    “That 160,000 still sounds like a lot of people, sure,” he writes. “But how about my favorite restaurant here in New York, Pies ‘n’ Thighs, which has only 3,281 likes—most likely locals who actually care about updates from a nearby restaurant? They would reach only a few dozen customers. A smaller business might only reach one. This also assumes the people ‘reached’ bother to even look at the post.”

    This comes just a couple days after Forrester’s principal analyst said brands and agencies are also becoming “disillusioned” with Facebook’s advertising products as well, opting to try out other social sites.

    Still, eMarketer is reporting that Facebook is gaining significant market share in the global ad market.

    Facebook hasn’t exactly been shy about its strategy of organic reach reduction. Arrogant maybe, but not shy. Here’s what the company said in a sales deck Ad Age obtained in December:

    We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.

    Meaningful, eh? Meaningful as in not showing users posts from the Pages that they specified to Facebook that they “like”? Oh, they must have meant meaningful to Facebook.

    Meanwhile, Facebook is making the News Feed more “meaningful” by adding content from Pages users haven’t even liked. With a recent redesign to the News Feed, they also removed the option to view by “most recent,” making the method to the madness all the more cryptic. At least they’re testing a “stories you might have missed” feature, though the only reason you’re missing them is that Facebook isn’t showing them to you to begin with.

    Is Facebook taking the right approach with organic reach in the News Feed? Let us know what you think.

    Image via Ogilvy

  • Forrester: Brands Are Disillusioned With Facebook

    Facebook is failing marketers, according to Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst, who says he’s talked to brands, who are becoming increasingly frustrated.

    This isn’t the first time Nate Elliott has criticized Facebook. Last fall, he wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook failing marketers, generating a fair amount of industry discussion. In that, he told the CEO that a Forrester survey of nearly 400 marketers and eBusiness executives told the firm that “Facebook creates less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.”

    He included this graph:

    Facebook

    And that was before the company implemented its devastating News Feed algorithm changes, which all but killed organic visibility for brands who spent years acquiring “likes” from customers who wanted to see updates in their feeds.

    Even since then, Facebook has started cramming in more content from Pages users actually haven’t liked.

    But organic reach is one thing. Paid is another, right? According to Elliott, Facebook’s paid ad products “aren’t delivering results for most marketers” either.

    “Brands and agencies are now openly talking about their discontent,” he writes in a new blog post (via Business Insider). “Every day I talk to brands that are disillusioned with Facebook and are now placing their bets on other social sites — but few of them want to go on the record. Lately, though, more brands and agencies have started speaking openly to the media about how Facebook is failing them. One former Facebook advertiser referred to Facebook as ‘one of the most lucrative grifts of all time.’”

    That would be James Del, head of Gawker’s content studio in a recent DigiDay article. The rest of his statement was, “First, they convinced brands they needed to purchase all their fans and likes — even though everyone knows you can’t buy love; then, Facebook continues to charge those same brands money to speak to the fans they just bought.”

    “Marketers are worried many of their fans are ‘fake,’” continues Elliott. “Many marketers and many publishers are reporting that huge percentages of their fans come from emerging markets where they didn’t expect to find an audience. The kicker? They’re saying many of those fans don’t seem to interact with people or with branded content — they seem to do little other than ‘like’ thousands and thousands of brand pages. The conclusion some marketers are coming to: The paid ads Facebook encourages them to buy often lead to ‘fake’ fans generated by ‘like farms.’”

    He goes on to mention that one B2B marketer told him that Facebook’s “constant rule changes” are the biggest problem they have, and concludes that marketers don’t believe Facebook will ever “live up to its promise and become a valuable marketing channel.”

    This hasn’t stopped Facebook from raking in the ad dollars. In January, Facebook reported that its ad revenue was up 75% year-over-year at $2.34 billion (with 53% of that from mobile, which itself was up 23%).

    And yes, on the organic side of Facebook’s News Feed, things really are that bad. Earlier this month, research from Ogilvy found that the average organic reach of content published on brands’ Facebook Pages had fallen to 6% by last month (compared to 12% in October).

    As you can see, it’s even worse for Pages with more likes. Way to reward the brands creating the most engagement, Facebook.

    Those are some depressing lines, eh? They don’t exactly look like they’re about to change paths in March do they?

    Images via Forrester, Ogilvy

  • Facebook Gives Users More From Pages They Haven’t Liked

    Facebook announced a new News Feed feature on Tuesday, which will show users more updates from Pages they don’t follow. This comes at a time when Facebook is already showing users less from the pages they’ve actually gone out of their way to “like”.

    Should Facebook show users more from the pages they actually like as opposed to from the Pages it thinks they’ll like? Share your thoughts.

    You’ll see updates from Pages that you haven’t liked when they’re about other Pages that you have liked. For example, if you like Dwight Howard on Facebook, you might see a Bleacher Report update about him if they’ve tagged him in their post.

    As Facebook notes, it already does this with updates from friends. The company tested the feature for Pages, and found that people gave this kind of content high scores in surveys.

    Not all users agree. One person commented on a CNET article, “Facebook, how about showing me the posts from the pages I indicated I was interested in by ‘liking’ them or posts that I may be interested in that are posted by my ‘friends’ before you spam me with random content.”

    That seems like the expected reaction.

    “We look at many factors to make sure the most relevant stories appear in News Feed, including which posts are getting the most engagement (such as likes, comments, shares and clicks) across all of Facebook,” says product manager Andrew Song. “We also consider which posts are getting the most engagement from people who like both the Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.”

    “For example, if many people who like Dwight Howard also like the Bleacher Report, it suggests that these two Pages are connected,” he adds. “If we see that people who like both the Bleacher Report and Dwight Howard are liking the post above, that’s an indication that it may be relevant for people who only like Dwight Howard. This means some Page posts that tag other Pages may be seen by new people.”

    Facebook considers the feature a way for people to discover conversations around topics they’re interested in, not unlike the Trending feature it recently launched. It is quite different, however, as Trending appears off to the side as opposed to in the News Feed itself.

    It will be interesting to see how Page owners react to the change. As you may know, Facebook recently made adjustments to its News Feed ranking algorithm that greatly hurt the visibility of many pages’ posts, while rewarding Pages that managed to be white-listed for “quality” by Facebook.

    That was a controversial enough move, but adding posts from Pages that people haven’t even liked into their news feed seems like a slap in the face of the Pages that have already suffered this visibility loss.

    When people “like” a Page on Facebook, it means they want to keep up to date with whatever person or brand that Page represents. That has historically been how it’s worked. Now, unless you’re on Facebook’s white list, it seems like there’s hardly any point in trying to get people to like your Page.

    Luckily, Facebook has said that it will work to take more signals into account in determining “quality” – meaning, eventually, it should be less about being on a white list. That’s just the way it is now because Facebook only looks at source as a quality signal.

    It’s interesting that Bleacher Report is the example Facebook chooses to show. This was one of 29 sites it worked with on some other Page testing, which it discussed last fall. Back then, Facebook was encouraging Pages to increase the frequency of their posting, finding that for sites like Bleacher Report, BuzzFeed, Time and the other 26, referral traffic increased significantly. Then came the algorithm update, and BuzzFeed is was one known to have flourished. When asked for the whole list of 29 sites recently, Facebook declined to share it.

    Do people really want to see more content from Pages they have not actually liked and less from those that they have? Do you? Let us know in the comments.

    Images via Facebook

  • Facebook News Feed Update Earned This Site More Likes In 2 Months Than In Previous 5 Years

    BuzzFeed isn’t the only winner from Facebook’s recent “Panda” update. Mental Floss has made out incredibly well too, according to a Poynter report.

    Have Facebook’s recent changes to News Feed ranking affected your Facebook traffic? Let us know in the comments.

    In December, Facebook announced some changes to how it ranks content in the News Feed. The social network said it was placing an emphasis on “quality” content, aiming to show more of that and less memes and other things of little substance that have typically done very well.

    And just like that, all kinds of Pages starting getting a lot less News Feed visibility. The problem (one of them, at least) is that the algorithm appears to be playing favorites rather than truly distinguishing quality content versus low quality.

    Last week there was a lot of talk about how big-name viral content sites BuzzFeed and Upworthy have performed since the update. BuzzFeed is up, and Upworthy is down (though it’s still unclear if it was really Facebook hurting Upworthy, or if it’s just stabilizing after an unusually high traffic month). Either way, BuzzFeed is up, and is still raking in the Facebook engagement, and this is not just on the site’s “quality journalism” articles, but also on articles like, “The Definitive Ranking Of Poop,” which is up to nearly 10K likes and 3K Facebook shares after a week, compared to just 233 tweets.

    You can click the link, and judge for yourself just how high quality this piece of content is. To be clear, it’s not that I’m knocking BuzzFeed for producing this kind of content. This is the kind of thing that BuzzFeed is known for, and obviously some people do like it. But Facebook holding content like this up on a pedestal as a high mark of what counts for quality in the News Feed at the cost of visibility (and potentially business) for other content providers is a different story.

    In reality, it’s not that Facebook is intentionally trying to show people more poop list-like articles. It’s just that it considers BuzzFeed itself a trusted sources of high quality content, so as a result, it can put out whatever it wants without having to worry about the same kind of lost visibility as those negatively impacted by Facebook’s update. BuzzFeed is basically white listed.

    I know this because it’s the reality laid out by Facebook itself in an interview just after the update was announced. News Feed manager Lars Backstrom told Peter Kafka (then at All Things D), “Right now, it’s mostly oriented around the source. As we refine our approaches, we’ll start distinguishing more and more between different types of content. But, for right now, when we think about how we identify ‘high quality,’ it’s mostly at the source level.”

    So things might get better, but for right now, it doesn’t matter if you break the biggest news in the world if you’re not one of the sources Facebook has deemed “quality”. You won’t get poop list-like visibility. The time table for further News Feed algorithm tweaks to address this is anybody’s guess. In the meantime, if your visibility has dropped off despite having quality content, you’ll just have to deal with it, and hope Facebook really does figure things out.

    But back to Mental Floss, another apparent beneficiary of the apparent white list. The site does a lot of lists too, but they tend to be of significantly greater substance than the aforementioned poop list. Recent ones include: The Original Locations of 15 Famous Food Chains,” “The First Guests on 22 Late Night Talk Shows,” “25 Things You Might Not Know About Boston, and “9 of Thomas Jefferson’s Head-Turning Hobbies.” You know, lists that you can actually learn from.

    Post by mental_floss.

    According to Poynter, the site’s monthly Facebook referrals have nearly doubled (from 1.9 million in November to 3.7 million in both December and January). It has gained more likes over the past two months than it got in its first five years on Facebook. Could Mental Floss’ history as a print publication be influencing Facebook’s treatment of the site? Interestingly, the report says Mental Floss was only officially verified by Facebook around the time it started getting all the new traffic.

    Another interesting nugget to come out of the report (in which author Sam Kirkland spoke with the site’s editor-in-chief) is that Mental Floss is not posting more frequently to Facebook, but “rather thinking hard about what he chooses to post.”

    This is particularly interesting because before Facebook announced the News Feed update, it was actually encouraging publishers to increase frequency of posts to earn more referrals. In fact, BuzzFeed was specifically named as a partner that participated in a study that helped the social network to reach this conclusion.

    “As we’ve worked with our partners and shared best practices, we’ve found that on average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170% throughout the past year,” Facebook VP of Media Partnerships and Global Operations, Justin Osofsky, said in an October blog post. “In fact, from September 2012 to September 2013, TIME’s referral traffic has increased 208%. BuzzFeed is up 855%. And Bleacher Report has increased 1081%.

    “We worked with 29 media sites over a seven-day period to find out exactly how their referral traffic could be impacted if they increased the number of times they posted to their Facebook pages,” he said. “The net result: posting more frequently increases referral traffic by over 80%.”

    It’s unclear whether each of the 29 sites mentioned have benefited from the News Feed update.

    Update: After reaching out to Facebook for the whole list of sites, we’re told that they’re not disclosing it.

    How has your site been affected by Facebook’s changes? Let us know in the comments.

    Images via Facebook, BuzzFeed

  • Here’s Why BuzzFeed Can Still Get Facebook Traffic While You Can’t

    Some popular viral content sites have suffered drastic traffic declines since Facebook implemented its News Feed algorithm changes in December, which some have dubbed, for all intents and purposes, Facebook’s “Panda” update.

    Has your Page been affected by the changes? Let us know in the comments.

    Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider shared some traffic charts for such sites, including Upworthy, Elite Daily, and Distractify. They’ve all been on the decline since Facebook implemented its changes. Upworthy, one of the most well-known of such sites, has seen a 46% decline in traffic over two months, though the site’s co-founder told Carlson it’s more about Upworthy having a “crazy spike” in November than any ill effects from the Facebook update. As noted in the report, the last two months were better than October for the site.

    But there’s no question many Pages have experienced a dramatic decline in News Feed visibility since the changes. Some perhaps deservedly so (for Facebook’s purposes at least), and others not so much. In fact, the update is not entirely unlike Google’s Panda update in that way.

    Another way in which the two are alike is that neither initially penalized what many would deem the primary examples of publishers producing the types of content that the updates seemed designed to penalize. Demand Media’s eHow was the most widely noted example of a “content farm,” which is basically what Panda was supposed to go after, but the update did not hit the site at first (though that would change later).

    BuzzFeed is likely the most widely noted example of a publisher putting out the type of content Facebook seemed to want to reduce in the News Feed, but as Carlson points out, it has only grown its traffic since the update.

    Let’s look at some things Facebook said when it announced the update. Engineering manager Varun Kacholia said, “Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme. Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”

    Perhaps BuzzFeed more often publishes lists of memes or silly photos than just singular memes or silly photos, but most would probably assume this stuff would fall more into the category of things Facebook wanted to show less of as opposed to the “high quality articles” category. You what I’m talking about. Take, for example, this gem from BuzzFeed’s homepage from a couple hours ago:

    Just look at all that early Facebook engagement. 227 shares and 772 likes. Again, I stress, that’s only a couple hours old.

    Clearly this is the kind of high quality stuff Facebook is looking for.

    Carlson raised the question: What makes BuzzFeed so special? You know, compared to other sites like Upworthy and the like. One theory he brings up is that BuzzFeed “pays to play”. They create advertorials on their site, and buy Facebook ads to drive traffic to them. Apparently not incredibly enthusiastic with this explanation, BuzzFeed CEO offered an alternative in an email to Carlson, which is basically that Facebook wants sites like BuzzFeed to “invest in better and better content” that makes its network more valuable.

    Carlson also got a quote from Facebook on the matter saying that, “Organic News Feed ranking is not impacted at all by ads. We try to show people the things they will find the most interesting based on what and who they interact with, not who spends money on Facebook.”

    Yes, BuzzFeed has content that one would consider actual journalism. It’s certainly not the vast majority of what BuzzFeed has to offer (I have no idea what the site’s ratio of silly lists to actual journalistic pieces is), but it does have it. But so do other sites that have seen less visibility in the Facebook feed.

    What this is really about is likely Facebook’s shockingly unsophisticated methods for determining quality. The company has basically said as much. Peter Kafka at All Things D (now at Re/code) published an interview with Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom right after the update was announced.

    He said flat out, “Right now, it’s mostly oriented around the source. As we refine our approaches, we’ll start distinguishing more and more between different types of content. But, for right now, when we think about how we identify “high quality,” it’s mostly at the source level.”

    That’s what it comes down to, it seems. If your site has managed to make the cut at the source level for Facebook, you should be good regardless of how many GIF lists you have in comparison to journalistic stories. It would seem that BuzzFeed had already done enough to be considered a viable source by Facebook, while others who have suffered major traffic hits had not. In other words, Facebook is playing favorites, and the list of favorites is an unknown.

    Just to make this point clear, Kafka asked in that interview, “So something that comes from publisher X, you might consider high quality, and if it comes from publishers Y, it’s low quality?”

    Backstrom’s answer was simply, “Yes.”

    So as long as BuzzFeed is publisher X, it can post as many poop lists as it wants with no repercussions, apparently. It’s already white-listed. Meanwhile, you can be publisher Y and beak the news about the next natural disaster, and it means nothing. At least not until Facebook’s methods get more sophisticated.

    Well, we already knew Facebook liked BuzzFeed. A couple months before the News Feed update, Facebook was already talking up how BuzzFeed could increase its referral traffic by 855% by posting more frequently.

    The real question is: how can you prove your site’s value to Facebook? It’s going to be hard to prove it with engagement when Facebook’s not showing your content to people in the first place.

    Do you think Facebook’s algorithm will get better at determining what content is of a higher quality? What are some signals it should consider beyond source? Share your thoughts.

    Update: BuzzFeed’s “The Definitive Ranking Of Poop” now has over 500 Facebook shares and 1.2 Facebook likes in just over three hours.

    Update 2: A day later, and the shares are up to 2K with likes at 7.7K.

    Update 3: Early on day three: still in the 2K range for shares with likes up to 8.8K.

    Image via BuzzFeed

  • Is Free Visibility On Facebook A Thing Of The Past?

    Is Free Visibility On Facebook A Thing Of The Past?

    It would appear that for most businesses, it’s only getting harder and harder to get your messages out to your fans. Remember the days when everybody was signing up for Facebook, and you had an awesome free way of getting in front of your biggest fans on a daily basis? They’d “like” your page because they liked your brand, wanted to engage with your business or get deals when you had them to offer. A marketing dream come true. Unfortunately, that dream is over.

    Due to recent changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, it’s just harder than ever to actually get your updates seen. Let’s not kid each other. It’s been getting harder for years, in general, but one of these latest changes was essentially Facebook’s version of the Panda update, except that it is likely even further reaching, and doesn’t have nearly as many guidelines for establishing what should be seen vs. what shouldn’t.

    Google takes into account a variety of factors related to trust, reputation, duplicate content, spelling and factual error, attempting to put out content just for ranking, general quality control, thoroughness, etc. When Facebook launched that update, the company said that the change was “mostly oriented around source,” but that over time, it could start “distinguishing more and more” between different types of content. But as I asked back then, when does Facebook ever do anything quickly? Are you one of the few that has seen that nearly year-old “new” News Feed yet? How about the inclusion of status updates in Graph Search announced back in September? No? Me neither.

    Facebook has, however, announced additional changes to the News Feed algorithm. After that initial Facebook “panda” update, Ignite Social Media put out a report finding that brands across sizes and industries were seeing a 44% decline in organic reach on average, with some seeing declines of up to 88%. Only one saw an increase.

    Facebook has since revealed further News Feed tweaks to show users less text status updates from Pages (like businesses and brands). The News Feed now treats text status updates from pages differently than ones from regular users. According to the company, it has seen that people write more status updates (9 million more per day on average) when their friends write status updates, but the effect is not the same with updates from Pages. Therefore, they’re not going to show text status updates from pages as much.

    “We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types,” says News Feed ranking product manager Chris Turitzin. “This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.”

    According to Turitzin, the best way to share a link on Facebook after the update is to use a “link share.” That means using the actual link option to share, as opposed to just including the link at the end of a text update.

    Facebook link shares

    But how much of a difference will it make compared to how well link shares were doing after that other update? We haven’t seen much difference. We’ve not encountered any evidence that links are magically getting any more visibility.

    Chat Wittman, founder of EdgeRank Checker wrote a blog post comparing sites that were seeing more and less organic reach in the News Feed. A page with reach on the decline posted mostly status updates, and asked for engagement frequently. One that saw in increase posted mostly photos and rarely asked for engagement.

    Wittman suggests focusing on engagement (which is different than calls to action asking for it), analyzing why fans click “like” on your content, avoiding those calls to action, avoiding memes, analyzing outbound links to see which sources are most well received, increasing post frequency and testing different times of day for different types of content.

    To the point of increasing frequency, this is actually something that Facebook has basically endorsed itself, by the way, though obviously it’s going to depend on just what you’re posting.

    By the way, just look at this graph from EdgeRank Checker showing the decline of organic reach:

    organic reach
    Image via Moz

    If there’s a sliver of good news to any of this, perhaps it’s that Facebook’s general strategy appears to be driving users away from just the News Feed, or at least to other ways of consuming Facebook in addition to it.

    Facebook has already begun putting out standalone apps. Other than Instagram, which it acquired rather than built, Messenger is it’s most popular one, but it just launched another one called Paper (a news reader).

    This is apparently just the beginning of a larger strategy which will see Facebook launching more of these apps to take up more of your phone (or tablet’s) homescreen. Users will tap into specific parts of Facebook. Want news? Go to Paper. Want to privately chat with a friend? Go to Messenger.

    It remains to be see what other apps exactly Facebook will reveal, but Mark Zuckerberg did recently indicate that Graph Search will be coming to mobile “pretty soon“. Perhaps this will be its own app. Either way, it will present new visibility opportunities (and challenges no doubt) for businesses.

    Graph Search has significantly improved the social giant’s search capabilities, but its potential is far greater than its current functionality. In addition to the aforementioned status update functionality, mobile is a huge part of what it could be – a way to find relevant content. Location is, of course, an extremely important signal in relevancy for some types of queries, and often those related to businesses.

    Josh Constine shares an interesting quote from Zuckerberg, talking about Messenger, but more generally about Facebook’s app strategy for this year:

    “The other thing that we’re doing with Messenger is making it so once you have the standalone Messenger app, we are actually taking Messenger out of the main Facebook app. And the reason why we’re doing that is we found that having it as a second-class thing inside the Facebook app makes it so there’s more friction to replying to messages, so we would rather have people be using a more focused experience for that.”

    A similar mentality could easily be applied to any other facet of Facebook. Apply it to Paper. With Paper, news is no longer a “second class citizen” to status updates or branded messages from Pages. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Facebook launches a standalone app that will cater more to Pages. How about simply a “Pages” app? Would anyone use it?

    We don’t know exactly how Facebook’s going to execute this strategy, but it’s possible that some of it will actually help Pages. Of course that would detract from the sweet “pay-to-play” deal they have going now, helping to line the corporate pockets with the dollars of businesses who just want to be seen. They’ve even got a new mobile ad network in the works, which would see Facebook ads appearing in third-party apps. What incentive do they have to give brands too much free visibility?

    But different standalone apps are going to mean new things for brands to consider. Look at Instagram. Brands have fully embraced that, and it’s turned into quite an impressive marketing tool for some of them.


    Image via Instagram

    You may be thinking, yeah, but this whole app strategy is just about mobile. What about the desktop? It’s true, none of this is going to do much to change how users behave with Facebook on the desktop. Users, however, are only using Facebook on mobile devices more and more. Facebook currently has more than 556 million mobile daily active users. That’s up 49% from a year ago. It has 945 million mobile monthly active users (up 39%).

    Can Facebook get better for brands that don’t want to shell out the ad dollars? I don’t know. Things don’t look great at the moment, but this increasing focus by the company on standalone mobile apps is going to be something to pay close attention to. Perhaps there will be some opportunities to make up some of the lost visibility among Facebook users that Facebook pulled away with its News Feed updates.

  • Facebook To Show Users Less Text Status Updates From Pages

    Last month, Facebook launched what some considered to be its “Panda update”. The company revealed that it had tweaked the News Feed algorithm to promote higher quality content, and essentially give more weight to news stories over memes and similar content.

    Facebook has now announced a further tweak.

    The News Feed now treats text status updates from pages differently than ones from regular users. According to the company, it has seen that people write more status updates (9 million more per day on average) when their friends write status updates, but the effect is not the same with updates from Pages. Therefore, they’re not going to show text status updates from pages as much.

    “We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types,” says News Feed ranking product manager Chris Turitzin. “This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.”

    According to Turitzin, the best way to share a link on Facebook after the update is to use a “link share.” That means using the actual link option to share, as opposed to just including the link at the end of a text update.

    Facebook link shares

    It will be interesting to see how the new update affects visibility of posts for brands, who have suffered greatly since the last big update.

    Image via Facebook

  • ‘Chilling’ News For Brands On Facebook

    Facebook recently launched an update to its News Feed algorithm aimed at promoting higher quality content. It’s being billed as Facebook’s version of the Google Panda update, mostly because that was also aimed at promoting higher quality content, and also has the ability to hurt businesses by eliminating their visibility.

    Have you been affected by Facebook’s update? Let us know in the comments.

    So far, it looks like brands are suffering pretty hard from the update. Ignite Social Media has put out a report after analyzing 689 posts across 21 brand pages of a variety of sizes and industries, finding that since December 1st, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average. Some, it says, have seen declines of up to 88%. One page out of the bunch saw an increase (5.6%).

    “As reach declined, the raw number of engaged users plunged as well, falling on average by 35%,” writes Jim Tobin on the Ignite blog. “Some pages saw engaged users fall as much as 76%. Only one page in the data set had an increase in the number of engaged users, coming in at 0.7%.”

    “Facebook once said that brand posts reach approximately 16% of their fans,” he writes. “That number is no longer achievable for many brands, and our analysis shows that roughly 2.5% is now more likely for standard posts on large pages. So, a year ago a brand could expect to reach 16 out of 100 fans and now that brand is lucky if they get 3 out of 100. Chilling news for brand pages who have invested resources to ‘build’ a large following of fans.”

    In the past, plenty of brands (and plenty of users, for that matter) have complained about Facebook not showing their posts to all of their fans, let alone more than 3%. After all, doesn’t one “like” a page because they want to see updates from that page? Isn’t that the whole point?

    A lot of people have wanted Facebook to give them a “pure” News Feed, giving them all updates from friends and pages they like. The closest thing resembling that – the ticker – isn’t even in the “new” News Feed design, though it turns out that might not be fully rolling out anyway.

    As the Ignite report points out, research from Forrester and Wildfire shows that engaged customers are most likely to purchase and recommend brands, and engagement is falling because of the new update. Chilling indeed.

    Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider suggests that the Facebook change has “screwed an entire profession”. He’s talking, of course, about social media marketers or “an industry of people who run Facebook pages for big brands.”

    Facebook seems to be going for the “pay to play” approach. Imagine if Google tried that in its general web search (they already are in Google Shopping). The News Feed isn’t search, so it may seem like apples and oranges, but like Google search, the Facebook News Feed is one of the biggest gateways to content discovery on the Internet. This is a big deal. Plus, Facebook does have Graph Search, which recently introduced status updates and other posts in results, though it’s been a slow roll-out. You have to wonder if the News Feed update will affect rankings here.

    AdAge reported last week that many would see their organic reach drop off, and that Facebook is acknowledging it with a sales deck that was sent out to partners, which said, “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

    There you have it.

    Interestingly this all comes after Facebook was telling publishers that upping their post frequency increases referral traffic. In October, Facebook said that with a group of media sites it tested, referral traffic grew by over 80% when they posted more frequently. There were 29 partner media sites, and one of them was BuzzFeed. All Things D reports that Vice President of Product Chris Cox, one of the main guys behind the changes, “especially has a problem with BuzzFeed and sites similar to it”. The report cites multiple sources on that.

    We have no idea if BuzzFeed is actually suffering from the changes, though the site did run an article saying that publishers are nervous about the changes. Here’s a snippet from that:

    “We’re starting to get very nervous,” one staffer at a major paper told BuzzFeed. “It’s scary that they can get everyone hooked on such high referral traffic then take it away so quickly with a quick flip of their algorithm.”

    What’s disturbing is that right now, the changes are mainly based on source rather than content itself. Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom gave an interview to All Things D last week, and said as much. He said Facebook will start “distinguishing more and more” between different types of content as it refines its approaches, so it might not all be based upon source in the future, but for now, it’s all about the source.

    It just so happens that BuzzFeed is a prime example of why this strategy is no good. Sure, BuzzFeed has many articles along the lines of “15 Signs You’re Eating Dinner,” but they also have real, in-depth articles. Good content is good content regardless of where it appears, and to penalize an entire site – the good and the bad – based on the bad, seems detrimental to the whole point of the changes. It would be like penalizing all YouTube content because there are a lot of shitty videos on YouTube.

    Why do you think Google has authorship? Facebook sure doesn’t know anything about the actual people putting out the content do they?

    Do you think Facebook’s News Feed changes will benefit the user experience? Can brands overcome the apparent blow? Tell us what you think.

  • You May Never Get That ‘New’ Facebook News Feed

    So you know that “new” News Feed Facebook unveiled back in March and began rolling out? If you haven’t gotten it by now, there’s a strong possibility that you won’t ever get it, or at least not exactly.

    That is according to a report today from All Things D, citing unspecified sources (presumably within the company) which says, “In the small rollout to a single-digit percentage of users, engagement with the new design has stalled. So much so, in fact, that the majority of users won’t receive this Facebook redesign we saw unveiled this year.”

    Mike Isaac reports, “Instead, sources said, it’s back to the drawing board on a better News Feed, while using the failed first launch as a data point for creating a better Version 2. When users finally do see something new, it will likely be a far less drastic change, incorporating only some of the modifications, and only those that worked better than others.”

    On the record, a Facebook spokesperson told Isaac that the company is still testing the redesign changes.

    Facebook made a big production in unveiling a drastic change to its most important product, and now we learn that it might not even come to fruition. At this point, perhaps they’re thinking that we’ll just forget about it. In reality, many probably already have, if they were even aware of it to begin with.

    And we were complaining about a slow roll-out in April.

    Facebook has since been tweaking the actual algorithm behind the News Feed in the meantime, and that appears to be the greater area of focus these days.

    Last week, the company talked about new changes that aim to promote higher quality content. Good luck in your visibility efforts if your’e not a Facebook favorite.

    Image: Facebook

  • Facebook Gets Its Own Panda Update

    As reported earlier this week, Facebook has made some changes to how it ranks content in the news feed, putting a greater emphasis on content quality. The update may have a significant impact on how visible your site’s content will be on the social network. Comparisons to Google’s Panda update have emerged.

    Do you think Facebook’s News Feed update will have a positive or negative impact on your site? On the Facebook experience in general? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    As a WebProNews reader, you probably know how big Google’s Panda update was. If you don’t, you can learn all about it here. Long story short, Google launched a major algorithm update a couple years ago aimed at returning higher quality content in its search results. The move gave so-called “content farms” less incentive to flood the web with mediocre to poor content to serve ads on. It’s been a controversial move to say the least, and the update has been refreshed numerous times, and continues to plague some webmasters to this day.

    Google is obviously one of the primary ways Internet users find content. Another is Facebook. Like Google, it’s one of the main gateways to information on the web. If you produce web content, you want people on Facebook to be able to find it, just as you want Google searchers to find it. While perhaps not to the extent of a Google update, a Facebook News Feed update can have a major impact on a website’s ability to attract pageviews and customers. Facebook updates have already been detrimental to companies in the past.

    Facebook says the new changes may not be on the scale of the Google Panda update, but are “a step in that direction.”

    In its announcement, the company said it is paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from the News Feed on mobile. There’s good news for publishers in that they’re going to start showing more links to articles, especially on mobile, where nearly half of Facebook users are accessing the social network exclusively.

    “Why are we doing this? Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme,” says Facebook software engineer Varun Kacholia in a blog post. “Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”

    “To complement people’s interest in articles, we recently began looking at ways to show people additional articles similar to ones they had just read,” Kacholia adds. “Soon, after you click on a link to an article, you may see up to three related articles directly below the News Feed post to help you discover more content you may find interesting.”

    Here’s what that looks like:

    Facebook articles

    Earlier this year, Facebook introduced the concept of “story bumping” to the News Feed algorithm. This is when Facebook “bumps” up a story in the News Feed because it’s getting a lot of likes and comments.

    Facebook is now updating bumping to highlight stories with new comments. So now, you’re more likely to revisit a story that you saw before if your friends have commented on it.

    “Our testing has shown that doing this in moderation for just a small number of stories can lead to more conversations between people and their friends on all types of content,” says Kacholia.

    So there’s more to what Facebook is doing than the Pandaesque update, but that’s a major part of things, and Facebook News Feed manager Lars Backstrom opened up a bit more about it in an interview with All Things D’s Peter Kafka.

    He says they’re not really looking to promote/demote types of content, but rather do a better job of “identifying value”.

    “In the past, there were a lot of things that all fell into one bucket, and we would treat them all the same, even though they clearly weren’t,” Backstrom told Kafka. “If you see a funny meme photo in your feed — sure, you get some value from that. But if you compare that to reading 1,000 words on AllThingsD, you would presumably get more value from that experience than the first one. And, in the past, we were treating them as the same.”

    Umm, with all due respect to All Things D, isn’t that a matter of preference – something illustrated by social interaction? Kafka basically suggested as much back to him. According to Backstrom, the surveys indicate people want the quality articles more than the cat photos. But in the end, doesn’t it really depend on the article and on the cat photo? And what happened to Facebook being about what people are sharing? People like to share cat photos. People like when other people share cat photos. If there’s one thing the Internet has proven it’s that. Also, I wonder how many of Facebook’s over a billion users were actually surveyed. I don’t remember being asked about this. Do you?

    I’m not saying I personally don’t prefer a good article to a cat photo, but that’s beside the point.

    Backstrom says Facebook is not trying to “impose its will” on people. He also admits that surveys “are not necessarily the truth,” but that treating “every single click as having the same value,” as in cat photo clicks vs. in-depth article clicks, would be “as naive”.

    So the new way of doing things is naive too?

    And here’s something that a lot of smaller sites aren’t going to like very much. Right now, the changes are “mostly oriented around the source,” according to Backstrom. So apparently brand is going to make a big difference right off the bat, regardless of how in-depth your content is.

    Talk about the “filter bubble“.

    People have been calling for an unfiltered Facebook news feed for years, and they kind of got one, when Facebook launched the Ticker. Earlier this year, Facebook launched the “new” News Feed. That was in March, and a lot of people still don’t have the design. Some variations of the design don’t include the ticker, and others have it down in the corner in a less noticeable part of the interface. The future of the feature is uncertain. A lot of content is going to only be visible via the Ticker, Graph Search or on actual Timelines. The News Feed is what everyone pays attention to.

    Backstrom does say that Facebook will start “distinguishing more and more” between different types of content as it refines its approaches, so it might not all be based upon source in the future, even if it starts off that way. But who knows how long that will take? When does Facebook ever roll out things quickly?
    Google did after the Panda update. That certainly didn’t appease everyone, but at least it was something. It’s a hell of a lot more to go on than what Facebook is giving people so far. Google’s list also included twenty-three bullet points. That’s a lot more consideration than just the source of the content.

    It’s going to be harder to build a brand if Facebook – the biggest social service in the world – won’t acknowledge it to begin with.

    While meme photos are mentioned specifically by Facebook as things that will be less visible, Backstrom told Kafka that this was just an example, and that it’s not targeting one category or another.

    Apparently the kinds of posts that have a call to action (Backstrom gave Kafka the example of “one like = one respect“) that are designed to simply get likes, will not be doing so well with the update.

    Asked if the update is targeting sites like Buzzfeed or Upworthy, he said that there are no specific targets, and that he doesn’t know how the changes will impact those sites. At the very least, it may affect those sites’ sharing tactics.

    According to Backstrom, the changes aren’t going to eliminate funny Imgur photos and the like from your News Feed entirely. You just may see less of that kind of thing. I know some of us are at least hoping for less Bitstrips.

    You have to wonder how all of this will affect Facebook’s teen problem non-problem.

    Oh, did we mention that Facebook is also spreading the message that marketers are going to have to pay them if they want more visibility? AdAge reported this week:

    If they haven’t already, many marketers will soon see the organic reach of their posts on the social network drop off, and this time Facebook is acknowledging it. In a sales deck obtained by Ad Age that was sent out to partners last month, the company states plainly: “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

    Discuss.

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

  • Now Articles Can Get More Facebook Visibility

    Facebook announced that it has updated how it ranks stories in the News Feed to surface what it deems to be more relevant news, as well as what your friends have to say about it.

    Specifically, Facebook says it is paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from the News Feed on mobile. There’s good news for publishers in that they’re going to start showing more links to articles, especially on mobile, where nearly half of Facebook users are accessing the social network exclusively.

    “Why are we doing this? Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme,” says Facebook software engineer Varun Kacholia in a blog post. “Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”

    “To complement people’s interest in articles, we recently began looking at ways to show people additional articles similar to ones they had just read,” Kacholia adds. “Soon, after you click on a link to an article, you may see up to three related articles directly below the News Feed post to help you discover more content you may find interesting.”

    Here’s what that looks like:

    Facebook articles

    Earlier this year, Facebook introduced the concept of “story bumping” to the News Feed algorithm. This is when Facebook “bumps” up a story in the News Feed because it’s getting a lot of likes and comments.

    Facebook is now updating bumping to highlight stories with new comments. So now, you’re more likely to revisit a story that you saw before if your friends have commented on it.

    “Our testing has shown that doing this in moderation for just a small number of stories can lead to more conversations between people and their friends on all types of content,” says Kacholia.

    Facebook recently told publishers that posting more frequently increases referral traffic by over 80%.This was based on testing with 29 partner media sites.

    An October Pew Research Center study found that half of U.S. Facebook users use the social network to get news.

    Image: Facebook

  • Facebook Promises More Relevant Ads with Algorithm Tweak

    Ads are just a part of your Facebook news feed now. Whether they’re sponsored stories, page post ads, suggested posts, or whatever – the point is that they are there and they’re not going anywhere.

    With that in mind, Facebook says that they want to make the ads you see more relevant to your interests. To do that, the company is announcing an update to their algorithms that they say will enhance both the relevance and quality of every sponsored post you see on the site.

    “We are currently working on some updates to the ads algorithm to improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see. When deciding which ad to show to which groups of people, we are placing more emphasis on feedback we receive from people about ads, including how often people report or hide an ad,” says Facebook engineering manager Hong Ge.

    Facebook learns about which ads are more relevant to you based on your interactions with them – clicks, likes and shares. But they also make this determination based on more direct feedback – like when you hide an ad from your news feed.

    What Facebook says they’re doing with this algorithm tweak is to put more focus on that part of it, when you tell them that you don’t want to see this kind of ad anymore.

    If you’re marketing on Facebook and actively running campaigns, Facebook warns that you may see a difference in your numbers in the coming weeks.

    “This means that some marketers may see some variation in the distribution of their ads in the coming weeks. Our goal is to make sure we deliver the most relevant ads, which should mean the right people are seeing a specific ad campaign. This is ultimately better for marketers, because it means their messages are reaching the people most interested in what they have to offer.”

    They also say that these changes won’t just be better for users, but it’ll help them direct marketers’ ads to people that are actually receptive to them.

  • The Facebook Ticker Has Gone Missing

    The Facebook Ticker Has Gone Missing

    Update: It’s back.

    A lot of Facebook users are noticing that the ticker is gone from their homepage today.

    The ticker, if you’re unaware, is the panel that shows every piece of activity your Facebook friends are engaging in. It’s like the News Feed, if the News Feed actually showed you everything. That means status updates, comments friends have made on others’ posts, things they listened to on Spotify, things they have liked, etc. All in real time.

    Now it appears to be gone, at least for a substantial portion of Facebook’s users. Nobody here at the office is able to see it, and there are a lot of people on Twitter talking about it too.


    In fact, we’re noticing that a lot of people are searching Google and other search engines for information about it.

    Earlier this year, Facebook introduced the new News Feed, with different variations. Some of these included the ticker, but put it down in the corner, where it is less noticeable. Some didn’t get the ticker at all.

    It’s unclear just how many of Facebook’s users have even gotten the News Feed redesign at all. It’s still slowly rolling out. Many, many people still have the old look, and the ticker has remained present all this time, but is even gone from that style now (again, at least for a significant number of the social network’s users).

    The fact that so many people are talking about it missing and searching for info about it suggests that there are quite a few using it. If you’re one of those people, you’re probably going to have to get used to it being gone, as it’s looking like it’s not really part of Facebook’s future plans.

    You’ll just have to rely on what Facebook chooses to show you in the news feed. They’re messing around with that too, by the way.

  • Facebook Messes With News Feed Again, Presents New Visibility Challenges

    Facebook has been messing around with the way the News Feed works again, even as many people are still waiting to even get access to the “new” News Feed design the company unveiled all the way back in March. This has implications not only for users, but for businesses who rely on reaching customers in one of the most-viewed spots on the Internet.

    Are the changes Facebook has been making to the News Feed good or bad for businesses? For users? Let us know what you think.

    Facebook announced that it has made an update to the News Feed ranking algorithm, making organic stories that people didn’t scroll down far enough to see reappear near the top of the feed when they’re getting a bunch of likes and comments. This is being referred to as “story bumping”.

    Facebook has been testing the change, and shared some data points surrounding it.

    “In a recent test with a small number of users, this change resulted in a 5% increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on the organic stories people saw from friends and an 8% increase in likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they saw from Pages,” says Facebook’s Lars Backstrom.

    “Previously, people read 57% of the stories in their News Feeds, on average,” says Backstrom. “They did not scroll far enough to see the other 43%. When the unread stories were resurfaced, the fraction of stories read increased to 70%.”

    Well, that sounds pretty good for both users and businesses, no? This way, as a user, you’re going to see more content you missed, some of which you might actually be interested in. As a business, it means you have more chances to get in front of users, which has become increasingly hard to do (at least without paying Facebook). While we say the News Feed is presenting new challenges, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be more challenging to attain visibility. It just means there are new factors to consider.

    But make no mistake. It will still be a challenge to get in front of users. Facebook reportedly said that 1,500 potential stories are filtered from your News Feed on any given day.

    The company also announced some other interesting changes called “Last Actor” and “Chronological By Actor”.

    The first looks at the 50 most recent people you engaged with on Facebook, and shows more of them in the feed. The latter aims to put updates from friends in chronological order when they post a series of updates, which makes sense in the case of live-Facebooking events, TV shows, games, etc.

    Story Bumping is reportedly live on the desktop and is rolling out to mobile, while Last Actor has rolled out, and Chronological By Actor is coming in the future.

    Ari Rosenstein, VP of Marketing for Facebook PMD Adotomi says, “The News Feed has clearly been the key to Facebook’s success over the last two quarters. It seems like such a natural feature to be in a social network, but it has truly revolutionized our personal communication and proved to be the revenue driver that Facebook was searching for since it’s IPO. The News Feed is where we instinctively go to get the latest information about our friends, but also about the world. Often we find out about greater news events because of the reactions to news stories by our friends and family. If YouTube is our custom picked media channel, then the Facebook News Feed is the media channel our friends pick for us. All of the content is picked by others yet it retains a very high degree of relevancy to us, making one of the best information recommendation and discovery engines out there.”

    “News Feed improvements like ‘Last Actor’ and ‘Story Bumping’ are going to make newsfeed content even more targeted and relevant for users which is a great benefit,” Rosenstein adds. “For advertisers they should look to focus more on ads in the News Feed and less on page posts to Fans as ads will allow for better targeting, larger reach, and the ability to better control the duration of the message.”

    EdgeRank, which has historically been the foundation for Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, is apparently no longer a thing, at least in name. Now it’s just the News Feed Algorithm.

    “While the name ‘EdgeRank’ may be disappearing, News Feed content will still be ranked based on weighing factors like user affinity and the number and types of engagements a post receives; factors that are already in use with EdgeRank. However, the importance of optimizing for previous EdgeRank factors like time decay is changing significantly,” writes Adam Greenwald at marketing firm iCrossing.

    “These changes highlight a distinct difference: it’s now not just how recently a story was posted that matters, but how recently you engaged with that user or Page,” he notes. “With these new adjustments to Facebook’s algorithm, the winning strategy for brands will include optimizing not only for the timing and frequency of Page posts, but for frequent Page engagements. Optimizing for maximum engagement should continue to be first and foremost in the minds of social marketers.”

    In other words, don’t just expect to say things on your Facebook Page, and expect them to be seen by a large number of people. The more you actually engage with your fans, and expand combinations, the more likely you will have a successful post, visibility wise.

    Facebook is discussing the ongoing changes it makes to News Feed in a new series of blog posts. This began this week with one about Story Bumping (though it’s not actually referred to as that in the post). You can expect others to appear on the Facebook For Business blog.

    Facebook also completed the roll-out of Graph Search in the U.S. This also has very significant implications for businesses, particularly local businesses. The implications will only expand as the feature’s functionality does. The company reminded us that it is still working on features like the ability to search for posts, comments, and of course Graph Search for mobile.

    The company is also testing Trending Topics in its apparent efforts to become more like Twitter – a place for public conversations. There are going to be marketing opportunities on that front as well.

    Do you like what Facebook is doing with the News Feed? Do you consider the updates improvements? Let us know in the comments.