“It’s Not Global and There Are No Plans to Be.” — Facebook through its teeth

On October 21st, Filip Struhárik decided to take some time out of his day to write about the biggest drop in Facebook organic reach they had ever seen and the screenshot heard around the world was born.

Interactions on 60 biggest Slovak media Facebook pages. Facebook is testing Explore Feed since Thursday. Source: CrowdTangle.

Facebook had been recently testing some Newsfeed algorithm changes, namely the Explore Feed, that had shown a considerable drop in organic traffic across six countries (Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia.)

The basis of this Explore Feed was to take brand pages and move them into a seperate feed that combined what they called “The best pages from across Facebook”.

What happaned was we found a few different versions of this feed.

The first, which looks most familiar to users in the US, shows that it would be the best post from random pages you may have some sort of interest in. The second showed more of what Facebook was slowly trying to accomplish which was to take the original Newsfeed back to its origins of a friends first type of atmosphere.

This means no brand pages would show up in the users Newsfeed unless it was ad sets or sponsored content.

Being a Social Media Director myself, I did what any respectable person in a postion of authority would do and yelled, “Oh, this is a bag of dicks man!”

Some collegues and I discussing lower reach starting around the beginning of October recently made me want to go back and double check just how low our organic reach was getting with our clients.

Page impression from June 1 2017 through November 6th 2017

Yep.

We went from 2,135,419 total reach in August to 1,310,118 in October.

Same bullshit but wait a minute, this shouldnt be affecting us at all because it’s only a test in a few countries that Facebook has no plans of expanding anywhere else! Or do they?

From this Twitter Moment we get some information from Adam Mosseri, the Head of News Feed at Facebook, as he tries to put all the marketing and brand managers running around naked setting things on fire at ease.

While his comments calmed down some in the industry enough that they could sit back and enjoy some shitty American made cider, others started debating the rumors they’ve heard.

There was talk that shares of brand posts wouldnt even make it into the original Newsfeed and how all page posts would just be rolling around in a Beyond Thunder Dome feed that aggregates the kind of shit you unfriend people for sharing.

Fast forward to today Monday, November 6th.

Go ahead and scroll through your Newsfeed on mobile or desktop, I’ll wait. Notice anything a little different? Every page post you’re seeing in your original feed is an ad set.

Not only that, but here’s how Facebook is now showing you the posts from the pages you follow.

In a carousel.

“Page stories you may like” is a collection of eight posts from pages you follow all in one area.

So they’re not completely gone but seven out of eight are buried so damn deep the chance that whoever you’re trying to reach is going to dig through there to see them all is pretty slim.

Shared posts from pages were still showing up in the original Newsfeed for now but that may be until they shift completely to Explore Feed, have a dedicated Pages Feed, or stick with the carousels of page posts in the Newsfeed.

Even more to think about is how users will react once their Newsfeed becomes more of a personal space and they see your sponsored content. How will the sentiment be affected by invading their newly discovered friend time?

Is Facebook really looking out for the best intrests of the user and working hard to be the best publishing and media platform?

When a third of the planet is your customer, you can pretty much shit on some bread and make them buy a sandwich.

But you probally dont have to worry about eating one right?

“It’s not global and there are no plans to be”