Facebook smashed the organic visibility of businesses in six countries 

Facebook is making interesting headlines again! Since Thursday last week, Facebook has been running tests in six countries (Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sri Lanka) where the user news feed has been radically altered.

If implemented globally, this would mean big problems for those who rely on organic and viral visibility, such as major news media, as a large slice of news media traffic comes from an organic Facebook presence.

Newsfeed without news

Facebook’s new arrangement under testing is interesting. With the change, the content that has gained the organic and viral visibility of the Pages will be partly transferred to a separate news feed. 

This would leave the user’s “normal” feed with friends’ posts, the content of liked pages, and posts imported into the feed with paid advertising. Page content that appears in the news feed based on the behavior of other users (someone liked X or your friend Y commented on Z) would be removed from the main news feed.

From the user’s point of view, testing in six countries at the moment would bring benefits such as better visibility of friends and likes in their own feed. 

If implemented, it is also possible that there would be an increase in poorly executed paid advertising, particularly in the early stages of the change. 

On the other hand, in the long run, high quality and properly targeted paid content - to which Facebook wants to direct advertisers - does not inherently annoy Facebook users, but rather provides them with value-added content based on their interests.

Free visibility becomes paid.

Facebook is, after all, a publicly-traded company whose goal is to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders. According to Matti Littunen, an expert interviewed by the Guardian in his article, what we are seeing is perfectly normal Facebook behavior.

First, organic visibility is made easy to gather, which means that sites get a lot of visibility. Finally, publishers are gradually taken away and asked to pay to achieve the same results. Under the reform, companies have reported up to a 60-80% drop in users’ engagement rates.

We’re fine with this; I’m not.

For digital marketers, the change brings opportunities. If implemented, the reform would mean greater demand for quality paid content, which is our core competency.

On the other hand, as a user, I don’t like the reform. I like my Facebook just the way it is, and often the content that has garnered organic visibility has been the kind of content I’d want to see anyway. 

Bringing poorly targeted paid advertising to my feed sounds annoying because Facebook would show me things and products that I have no interest in in the first place. Of course, this will be remedied as companies and advertisers grow in quality targeting and advertising expertise.

No worries, yet

No immediate changes are needed now, as Facebook says the two-feed feature is not going global, at least not immediately. We suspect that a change along these lines is coming to the USA, although the timing is still a big question mark.

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