Facebook’s recent changes in news feed is a call of death for publishers

Is this the end for brands and publishers on Facebook?

Publishers are seeing a huge dip in engagement and reach ever since Facebook announced new changes in the news feed algorithm. The algorithm now favors friends and family over publishers, brands and news portals to keep the users engage more on Facebook.

CEO Facebook Mark Zuckerburg recently announced big changes in the news feed which resulted in less air time for posts from publishers, businesses, and celebrities while making it more centric towards friends and family. After the announcement, the change was being observed in selected regions and soon after that, the impact of the recent change in Facebook’s News Feed has been cited all over the world.

Facebook is making these changes to win back Facebook users who are now more interested in other platforms due to lack of interesting content. These changes, according to Zuckerburg, will allow people to have more “meaningful” conversations with each other. However, these changes have influenced brands, businesses, and media outlets quite badly. Most of the organizations are reporting the impact of these changes on their sites. According to Katherine Hays the CEO of Vivoom, a startup focused on user-generated campaigns,

“The overhaul of the news feed spells trouble not only for publishers and traffic but also for brands, which stand to lose the audience they worked (and paid) to build up themselves.”

Another motive of Facebook for making these changes is to curb fake news from untrusted new media outlets. However, so far this has not gone as planned, as there is also a potential risk of spreading of fake news from common users as well. Facebook has also recently announced to run a survey in its News Feed, where it will ask some questions about whether you think a certain publication is trustworthy or not. On the basis of a response from users, Facebook will decide which news outlets are untrusted, instead of asking from experts in journalism. Do you think this is going to work? Doesn’t matter, here is what Zuckerburg said,

“We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be the most objective.”

Meanwhile, various news media outlets are relying on local news to get most of the traffic from Facebook, as the social network has recently announced a separate section for local news and events section for local publishers called ‘Today In’.

To sum it all, if you are also worried that you are missing important posts from your trustworthy brands and publishers’ pages, head back to our guide to ditch irrelevant garbage on Facebook to see important/local stories.