Facebook newsfeed changes important for marketers

Dubai: Facebook recently announced the change of their newsfeed design whereby users can switch to the new layout optionally until it is implemented for all users in the coming weeks.

The new design focuses even more on your personal news and further optimises the Facebook experience. The way news is delivered is still based on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm which prioritises news based on their relevance to the user, type of content and timeliness.

This is important for businesses to consider in their content strategy in order to produce an optimised Facebook content. This change will, however, have a major impact for brands that operate Facebook pages as with the new design there is a friends-only filter, which will allow users to see only their friends updates and may never see the posts from the pages they follow.

This means that an imminent shift to a more influencer-based marketing strategy on Facebook is required. This may also mean that brands finally have to focus on quality over quantity in order to make an impact on the social network.

Strategy

There are many brand pages that have created large communities’ through advertisements and competitions, but such pages sometimes have a very low level of engagement. These pages will have to rethink their strategy and focus on re-evaluating their community.

Another change is a Photo only feed, were users will only see photos uploaded by their friends or pages they follow. For businesses this will mean a need to focus more on the visual content to improve their engagement factor.

A business page cover photo is also more important now — if a user likes a page the cover photo will actually appear on his main news feed and be visible to his friends. This of course applies to any other Facebook sharing activity the user initiates.

Asking users to check-in and offering local deals is another way brands can be promoted on the users’ news feed without advertising, which again shows how important real engagement is getting.

Of course there is still the advertising option, but we hope there will be a shift from pure advertising to a more engaged marketing approach. The future will tell if this Facebook update contributes to the change.