Facebook Updates Part 1: Impact on Your Business

Facebook’s announcement that it’s giving us users more control over our news feed means we never need miss another update. By marking certain friends or pages as ‘priority,’ we can ensure posts from those sources are shown at the top of our news feed.

Why the change? It turns out that most of us have more updates in our news feed than we can get through. This means that while we’re scrolling through endless posts from people we barely know, we could be missing an update from family or an all important announcement of a new ice cream flavour from Messina!

By allowing us to cut through the chatter and get to what we want first, Facebook is hoping to make our newsfeed a priority in our day. Combine this with the recently unveiled Instant Articles and Facebook is all set to be a one-stop-shop for all of our content consumption needs.

So, what do these changes mean for businesses on Facebook? It’s probably a matter of swim or sink. Since users now have a choice to prioritise a page, pages that make the cut are likely to see more love from the users who are committed to their brand. Those that don’t make the cut could see a drop in engagement numbers. However, those pages won’t stop appearing on news feeds altogether. As long as a user has liked or is following the page, Facebook’s algorithm still decides what posts make it onto news feeds.

Stay tuned for our Facebook update trilogy, Part 2: Prioritise Your News Feed and Part 3: Optimise Your Posts.