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Facebook Sucker Punches Brands With News Feed Updates

by Scott Bishop on October 28, 2009


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This past weekend Facebook did a nice karate kick to marketers and brands…right in the face.  And the web was ablaze with reaction.  I saw countless posts about how to fix Facebook’s new homepage.  Even protest groups have sprouted up.  The “Facebook: SWITCH BACK TO THE OLD NEWS FEED!!!” group has already reached 1,000,000 members in just three days.

As with all things at The Real Time Marketer, we’re not so much not interested in what Facebook users think, we’re concerned with what these updates mean to marketers and business owners.

Evaluation:  The new Facebook update was a sucker punch to brands.

Here’s why.

face punch

In case you missed it, Facebook added 3 new features this weekend.  The most notable being an updated News Feed.  You can read more about it HERE.

In short, the new News Feed changes to Facebook over the weekend were that “highlights” of your News Feed are now the default status, and all the updates you were used to seeing are known as The Live Feed.

The problem to marketers or anyone with a Facebook Page, is that your brand’s Page updates are now at the mercy of the Facebook algorithm.  This magical math formula controlled by the Wizard behind the curtain is what now determines if your Page updates will be seen by your fans…or if it will be ignored on the other side in the land of the lost…know as the Live Feed page.

As a brief test, to see how many updates I’ll actually see throughout the day, I “Fanned” several new pages last night.  Today:  Only 2 updates from Pages showed up in my feed out of 26 updates.  And one of those was my own page.

So basically, 1 out of 26 updates are seen?  That’s not a super high percentage for us marketers or business owners.

According to Facebook: “You’ll see the most interesting things that happened in the last day in the “News Feed” view. News Feed picks stories that we think you’ll enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked and commented on it and how likely you are to interact with that story.”

So exactly what decides what’s interesting?  This is an absolute punch in the junk to marketers.  You’ve worked your tail off acquiring Fans to sign up for your page…now they most likely aren’t even going to see you updates.

Facebook’s thinking is obvious…to encourage users to interact with more and grow closer to the people they already have a history of interacting with.  Weaker social connections (like with brand Pages) are less prioritized in this view.

My opinion is that it should be up to each individual user to determine which contacts they interact with.  The new News Feed basically determines that for you.  This is not good for brand Pages.

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Scott S. Bishop is editor for Real Time Marketer and a social media and marketing strategist.  He also blogs about social media communities at AxeroPulse.com. He is @thescottbishop on Twitter

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  • The novice Facebook users do not even understand that there is a difference. Some of these baby boomer users are just stumbling their way through Facebook now not even realizing there is a difference. A very close family member of mine (whose name I will not mention in fear of having to sleep alone tonight...lol) had no idea when I told them to click the "live" feed.

    This puts a whole new spin on Facebook. Small businesses always seem to be the ones that the big shots like to jab.
  • As a user and page admin, I'm frustrated. Although clicking once every time I want to see my full (live) feed isn't going to set me back more than one second, it's just incredibly annoying. My fan pages are now at the mercy of this mysterious algorithm, making me reconsider the amount of time and energy I invest in them.
  • melissa_larmon
    Good post, Scott! I think that Bill (below) has a point. This formats sets FB up to have groups pay to get their message through to new the default Update highlights area. As a user, I don't like it because there are lots of updates I'd like to see that aren't feeding. My new behavior is to click to the Live Feed almost immediately. I would like to have the option to set it as my default!
  • Makes sense from Facebooks point of view. They want to be able to charge brands and businesses to connect to people. Hard to convince them to pay for it if all the need to do is post updates to their pages that will be seen by all of their followers. What they are saying is, you want to talk to your Facebook followers? Pay me!
  • You have to wonder what FB brass was thinking seeing as the way they'll ultimately make money is by brands using the site for marketing purposes. I know my company fan page just became a lot less valuable to me.
  • Agreed! Time to grow-up FB - don't make Fan Page administrators and marketers hang out here and guess what you're thinking. Position and communicate so we have the opportunity to do the same. Ultimately if FB would like to charge businesses to connect with folks, then share a bit of the game plan.
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