Big news in social media this week, with Facebook announcing it is changing the algorithm of its news feed to focus on “friends and family,” and less on publishers/media. The New York Times reports:
The side effect of those changes, the company said, is that content posted by publishers will show up less prominently in news feeds, resulting in significantly less traffic to the hundreds of news media sites that have come to rely on Facebook.
The move underscores the never-ending algorithm-tweaking that Facebook undertakes to maintain interest in its news feed, the company’s marquee feature that is seen by more than 1.65 billion users every month.
It is also a reminder that while Facebook is vastly important to the long-term growth of news media companies, from older outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to upstarts like BuzzFeed, Vice and Vox Media, publishers rank lower on Facebook’s list of priorities.
The idea that Facebook is trying to help you connect with your friends and family more via Facebook is an illusion. The only reason Facebook is changing its algorithm is that it is trying to monetize your attention by keeping you on the site more frequently and longer. They have internal metrics that have shown that posts from friends and family provide “more engagement” and therefore, Facebook is doing whatever it takes to keep you (and the other one billion+ daily active users) coming back and refreshing your Facebook news feed.
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