Early signs show significant interaction drop for local news after Facebook makes changes
Facebook has unveiled arguably its most significant ranking change for local journalism since its controversial decision to reduce the amount of news it would share by 20% back at the start of 2018.
And while the new focus on ‘original news content’ is unlikely to have anything like the same impact on local news publishers as Facebook’s previous big change, early evidence suggests different sorts of stories will find favour with Facebook’s magic black box in the future.
Early data analysis suggests the number of interactions local publishers receive on posts on their Facebook pages have fallen 22%.
In June, the UK’s regional press saw 108.9m interactions to their posts, and are forecast to see 85.9m this month.
Interactions are a key indicator of how often posts made by publishers are being seen in Facebook feeds, which in turn makes them an indicator for how much traffic Facebook is sending to publishers.
Explaining the changes, Campbell Brown, Vice President of news at Facebook: “When we ask people what kind of news they want to see on Facebook, they continually tell us they want news stories that are credible and informative.
“We’re updating the way news stories are ranked in News Feed to prioritise original reporting and stories with transparent authorship. These signals are based on user research and were built with feedback from news publishers and academic experts. They will only apply to news content.
“Original reporting plays an important role in informing people around the world, from breaking a news story, to creating an in-depth investigative report, uncovering new facts and data, sharing critical updates in times of crisis, or broadcasting eyewitness reports. This important journalism takes time and expertise, and we want to ensure that it’s prioritized on Facebook.
“We will now prioritise articles in News Feed that we identify as original reporting on a developing story or topic. We do this by looking at groups of articles on a particular story topic and identifying the ones most often cited as the original source. We’ll start by identifying original reporting in English language news and will do the same for news in other languages in the future.
“Most of the news stories people see in News Feed are from sources they or their friends follow, and that won’t change. When multiple stories are shared by publishers and are available in a person’s News Feed, we will boost the more original one which will help it get more distribution. Defining original reporting and the standards for it are complex, so we will continue to work with publishers and academics to refine this approach over time.”
The killer question, as always for publishers, is what impact this will have on distribution of content — and the page views which tend to follow as a result.
Campbell added: “Original news and reporting may see an increase in distribution as a result of these changes, but it’s important to remember that News Feed uses a variety of ranking signals to prioritise content.
“We anticipate most news publishers won’t see significant changes to their distribution in News Feed as a result of these updates.”
Using Crowdtangle — which tracks what’s going on with posts made by brand pages amongst other things — Behind Local News looked at the pages runs by the country’s largest regional brands.
Collectively, content posted by the regional press in the UK generated 17.2m interactions last week, compared to 19.9m the previous week. (w/c July 13) and 20.8m for the week commencing July 6.
In June, the average weekly interaction rate was 25.2m, with 108.9m interactions overall.
We also looked at the posts which ‘overperformed’ for interactions last week — Crowdtangle defines overperforming as when posts receive more engagement than would be typically expected for the page.
- Aberdeen Evening Express: Lewis Capaldi seen in Aberdeen (56x more engagement than normal)
2. Manchester Evening News: Bad news for Brits wanting to go to Spain (44.5x)
3. Norwich Evening News: Photo of the day (41x)
4. Liverpool Echo: LFC fans clean up Anfield mess after Premier League celebrations (40.8x)
5. London Evening Standard: Not the way to wear a face mask! (38.5x)
6. EssexLive: Colchester Zoo announced birth of three endangered animals (36x)
7. Aberdeen Evening Express: Taco Bell announces Aberdeen store (32x)
8. Liverpool Echo: Celebrate Liverpool lifting the trophy with a special edition of the Echo (30.3x)
9. WalesOnlione: Sunflower feeds in Rhossili re-opening (27.3x)
10. Merseyside family cuts short holiday in ‘zombie apocalypse’ North Wales resort (27.2x)
