A reminder about Facebook’s relationship with publishers
A lot of people have been sharing this Digiday confession about Facebook ‘completely deprioritizing publishers’. It’s a great read that I advise anyone who works in social media to read. While I believe it’s essential to proceed with caution when dealing with tech platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, or LinkedIn, there are a few things outside the scope of the article that are important to consider.
First and foremost: Attention is a finite resource. Anything that starts taking up more user time or News Feed space will take away from other things. This is part of the reason why referral traffic has dropped — social videos took over.
2nd: When one star falls, another rises. Facebook isn’t in the business of knowingly destroying its product, and you can be assured that new initiatives such as Groups or Watch will continue to be important areas for Facebook for at least the next 6 months (predicting beyond that with Facebook is pretty much impossible, given how agile it is). So as your Page declines in importance, investment in Groups will pay off more. If engagement is higher-quality, sustained, and builds loyalty with readers, I think this is good. Speaking of which…
3rd: Let’s not kid ourselves. Pages have become terrible experiences. Large Pages have become a cesspit of toxic comments that disgust fans, Facebook themselves admit that passive viewing in the News Feed is bad, and moderating a Page that has hundreds of thousands (or millions) of fans has become unmanageable. Based my conversations with staff at Facebook and their own public statements, two terms get repeated again and again: “loyalty” and “hyper-engagement”. Those, not reach or total time spent are Facebook’s new goals. Remember, people getting sick of Facebook and quitting en masse is an existential threat to Facebook. They know that they have to focus on quality of time spent.
4th: As I’ve mentioned before, Facebook still needs publishers (to a certain extent). Many, many users come to Facebook to find news. This is a loyalty-forming habit that keeps them coming back to the site. It makes them open up Facebook first when breaking news happens. To keep a steady flow of news being published on their platform, Facebook are constantly playing a balancing act. Give too much away and they lose sight of their own objectives. Take too much and publishers will sour.
So where does that leave us? Every intelligent audience/social/engagement manager knows that it’s crazy to go all in on a platform you don’t control. Anyone who worked at a company that got 50% of their traffic from Facebook in 2015 learned that lesson the hard way. Facebook is a business and has its own interests to look after. Altruism for publishers’ sake just doesn’t make sense. That being said, there is still enormous potential on the platform. It still has the largest reach, it offers robust publishing tools, it forces other platforms to compete in developing new technology. Of course you shouldn’t be pivoting to video in 2018. That was never a solution, and the brands who pulled it off (my former employer, Al Jazeera English, included) are finding views for social videos harder and harder to come by as users tire of formulaic content.
Intelligent investment into products that further your company’s specific business goals is always a winning strategy. If you don’t see a way to make money with Facebook Watch, don’t invest in it just because others are. If you see a net positive impact of hiring a few community managers for Groups, that’s excellent. If Instagram has become an unexpected source of income, even better. As a good friend in the industry recently told me: “just don’t be stupid.”
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Ziad Ramley is a digital news consultant in London and the former social lead at Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter.
