What Facebook’s Meaningful Social Interaction Means for Marketers

On 19 Jan 2018, Facebook announced major changes to its News Feed algorithm. The change is intended to return FB to its original goal of facilitating meaningful social interactions and will result in users seeing less public content, news, video, and post from brands or businesses.

Users will see more posts from friends and families, posts from trustworthy sources, informative posts, and posts that are relevant to the local community.

Implications for Social Media Marketers

The changes had the following two implications for social media marketers:

Organic Reach Will Drop. Currently, unless a post is shared or commented on, organic reach is approximately 5% of fan base. With the changes in algorithm prioritizing meaningful social interactions, organic reach for most pages declined unless the type of content changes.

Increased Importance of Engagement. As FB’s new algorithm prioritizes interaction, user engagement with the content is important. Content that generates discussions amongst a page’s users would be prioritised in the news feeds of the page’s fans. “Update” type content will not generate much interaction and will not be shown on News Feed.