Facebook has got all blogs, website and business owners who use Facebook as their main source of traffic panicking after they announced a new algorithm that is going to affect the News Feeds of users.
Read the report By Mark Zuckerberg below;
One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.
We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.
But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.
It’s easy to understand how we got here. Video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years. Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other.
We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being. So we’ve studied this trend carefully by looking at the academic research and doing our own research with leading experts at universities.
The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good.
Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.
We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.
As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.
For example, there are many tight-knit communities around TV shows and sports teams. We’ve seen people interact way more around live videos than regular ones. Some news helps start conversations on important issues. But too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.
Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.
At its best, Facebook has always been about personal connections. By focusing on bringing people closer together — whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world — we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent.
According to the reports, they are going to concentrate more on Family and friends than business and third party posts that shows up in Facebook users’ feeds. The users on Facebook are going to be seeing posts from their friends and followers first in their feeds.
Sometime ago, there use to be a lot of adverts and news about the world showing up every time you scroll through your feeds on Facebook but this time around, all that are going to be eliminated some how. If I get what the report is saying right, it is going to be difficult for websites and businesses that rely most on Facebook traffic for sales are going to get traffic.
Even though the traffic is not going to stop coming completely, there is probability that there will be as much as 70% drop in social media traffic for businesses and publishers since their posts are going to show up very down below a user’s feed.
This could also mean Facebook adverts are also not going to convert better like it use to. I don’t really know what Facebook is up to but I know for sure they are not putting publishers and third parties into account when making changes to their website.
What is your take on this?