Facebook’s changing the newsfeed algorithm, and it really doesn’t matter
And neither do your page likes
Facebook recently declared a change in their newsfeed algorithm, aimed to promote your friends’ content at the expense of publishers’. News of this change reached the New York Times, The Verge and TechCrunch, to name a few. Some people are freaked out.
The change doesn’t necessarily matter.
Big publishers are often dependent on the newsfeed algorithm to drive traffic (visitors) to their sites. These publishers have accumulated hundreds of thousands of likes on their Facebook pages. Depending on the publishers’ newsfeed visibility, these likes can become site visitors (who can then view ads), or just be a worthless ego boost. Most people prefer the former.
Every time Facebook announces a change to the algorithm publishers scramble to adjust. That’s exactly what happened when the algorithm was altered to favor video content: many publishers set up specialized video teams to stay relevant. This time, however, the change is sweeping: publishers will get less visibility, and there’s nothing they can do about it. And for sites that are reliant on translating likes into website traffic, that’s a very bad thing.
Your business, on the other hand, isn’t reliant on Facebook likes traffic. It’s been years since you could set up a Facebook page and watch the likes counter ticking. Nowadays, to get likes you need to pay for ads, which is a rather pointless exercise. Take Mailchimp, for example — even with 250,000 likes, you might end up with very little interactions:
So with likes being almost worthless, why keep your business’ Facebook page?
As Facebook incentivizes businesses to pay for its discovery channels (via ads), pages are becoming more of a web presence EKG than a discovery channel. Your users will come to your Facebook page to learn more about your product, to get the latest updates and to chat with you if they run into problems.
This change is reflected in the prioritization of response time in Facebook page design. Response time is displayed above the number of likes the page has, emphasizing the communication functionality of pages over their discovery functionality.
Like the introduction of email inbox bundles (the “Promos” inbox in your Gmail, for example) ended up creating more focused and engaging newsletters, changes to Facebook’s algorithm will just create better, more communicative publishers.
Focused pages, that create fun and clever content for a specific audience and aren’t about just amassing likes to generate traffic, will still see engagement for their posts regardless of the news feed algorithm. Doing things like posting at the best possible time will help get your signal heard above the noise.
The one takeaway from this algorithm change is that the likes counter is no longer an important indicator: frequent, thought-out, positive communication is.
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