Facebook News Feed Update To Change Business Marketing Rules

March 30, 2013

Facebook have just announced the change of their newsfeed design and users can opt in to get early access to the new layout until it will be implemented for all users in the coming months.

   The new design focuses even more on your personal news and is further optimizing the Facebook experience.

The way news are delivered is still based on the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm which prioritizes news based on their relevance to the user, type of content and timeliness. This stays important for businesses to consider in their content strategy in order to produce optimized Facebook content.

   This change will also 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 only see their friends updates and may never see post by pages they follow.

   This means 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.

   There are many brand pages that have created large communities' through advertisements and competitions, but these 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 to focus more on visual content to improve their engagement factor. A business page cover photo will also more important now as if a user likes a page the cover photo itself will appear on his main news feed and be visible to the users friends, which 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 get promoted on the users news feed without advertising, which shows again how important real engagement is becoming.

   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 and the future will tell if this Facebook update contributes to the change.

��

Written by
Alexander Rauser
Alexander Rauser

CEO

Alexander Rauser is the author of Boardroom Guide to Digital Accountability and Digital Strategy: A Guide to Digital Business Transformation, and creator of the DSX Program, a digital strategy and transformation program for Enterprises.

Related Articles

Subscribe to our blog

Subscribe to our blog to receive relevant news and tips about digital transformation, app development, website development, UX, and UI design. Promise we won't spam you.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.