No Need to Panic as Facebook Once Again Changes the Rules of the Game

Facebook announced that it will roll out changes to the News Feed in the coming months. As a result, users will see more content from their friends and family and conversely less videos and content from brands. The change is supposedly promopted by Mark Zuckerberg’s concern about the mental health of Facebook’s users. However, do not expect Facebook to cannibalize its advertising revenue, as it is a public company accountable to its shareholders.

Facebook constantly changes its algorithm, but the recent announcement has publishers and particularly brands worried. It is widely acknowledged that publishers post far more content on Facebook than other brands. For example, Fox News published more than 49,000 times in December 2017 alone. Facebook, however, came under intense criticism for the purported impact the platform had on the 2016 U.S. presidential election through dubious news articles being pushed on the platform. Brands should be especially worried that Facebook deems videos as ‘passive content’ and might remove them from the News Feed.

Here are our thoughts on what the impending change means:

1. Brands will pay more to reach their target audience

Organic reach for most brands on Facebook is at an all-time low, with studies estimating it to be lower than 2% in some cases. Brands with a higher following, more than 500,000 fans, are affected even more.

This means brands will have to resort to paid advertising, or influencer marketing, as the only viable option to achieve maximum reach on Facebook. Moreover, advertising rates could become even more expensive as users spend less time on Facebook and brands are willing to pay a premium to reach their customers.

In fact, businesses may actually end up buying more advertising on Facebook to promote themselves simply because creating content and attempting to share it on the News Feed for free will no longer work as well as it once did.

2. Influencer marketing will become even more popular

In many cases, paid advertising has a lower return on investment than influencer marketing. Influencer marketing can also come across as being more authentic and engaging to users. Nevertheless, influencers will have to game the new Facebook algorithm and possible adjust their content to get a brand’s message across. In the worst case, influencers will simply abandon Facebook and embrace other platforms that allow them to make a living.

3. It’s high time to embrace Facebook Live

Even though Facebook argues that watching videos is a passive activity, it is inconceivable that videos will disappear from the platform. Videos are empirically more engaging than text posts, or posts with an image, and the Facebook algorithm will continue to reward engagement. It is highly likely that Facebook intends to favor live video streaming from its platform and is closing its doors to URLs leading viewers onto YouTube.

The way forward for brands on Facebook

These new changes mean that brands will find it increasingly impossible to beat Facebook’s algorithm and that organic reach is basically dead. Brands will have to adapt by being innovative in terms of using live video streaming and increasing their advertising budgets. Influencer marketing may be a viable workaround to the new algorithm until Facebook once again changes the rules of the game.