Social media is changing: the Facebook update and its impact on brands, businesses and the media
In recent years, Facebook became the world’s leading social media platform and we became completely dependent on it. From information that affects our shopping habits, to links to news and events in the country and beyond, to debates on political and social issues, everything can be found in one place and people became digitally lazy.
Mark Zuckerberg: The CEO of Facebook announced major changes to the Facebook News Feed a month ago. It said its 2 billion users will see less public content from brands, companies and media. The goal is to bring people together through meaningful posts from friends and family. This is a second major update that Facebook is making since last year when they have been working to reduce fake news and clickbait.
In 2018, Facebook will prioritize three functions:
• News that the community qualifies as trustworthy
• News that people find informative
• Local news that is relevant to where people live.
However, what does this mean for the brand and companies and what are the impacts?
With these updates, the brand and companies will notice that reach, video watch time and referral traffic on their pages will decrease. The impact will vary from page to page, depending on the type of content they produce and how people will interact with it. The pages with the greatest decrease will be those that publish posts that people do not react or comment on.
Businesses are no longer considering “organic reach” because fewer people see their content. They have already sponsored your posts for greater visibility and reach. Advertising will get more expensive even though an advertising algorithm will remain the same. You’ll need to focus more on quality than quantity of posts, campaigns rather than daily communication, and paid rather than organic reach. The time has come to focus on Google and your website, as well as activating other communication channels. We especially highlight Instagram as a social media platform that is constantly growing and behaves like Facebook behaved in the golden age. Let’s not forget that Instagram is owned by Facebook and it is not known how it will develop in the future.
According to Facebook, groups will have a greater role due to the possibility of fostering debates and discussions. But through groups you will not be able to generate visits to your website. It remains to be seen how things will play out in this regard.
Our view is that brands and businesses will adapt to this update very quickly, while the media will go through a turbulent process because they are much more reliant on Facebook. It’s easier for brands because they can develop a strategy that will include other communication channels, Facebook notwithstanding. The situation is different with the media. Facebook published new filtering systems where users will determine which media is relevant.