What does the Facebook News Feed change really mean for content?

January 24, 2018

Written by NewsWhip

Two weeks ago, Facebook sent publishers and content creators into a frenzy with its latest News Feed change.

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s News Feed will change so that users “can expect to see more from [their] friends, family and groups [and] less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.”

The change will force digital creators, publishers and brands alike, to focus on building meaningful relationships with their audiences. It will come down to creating relevant and timely content that sparks conversations, or, spending ad dollars to rank in the News Feed.

Quality storytelling will be at the crux of content, as Facebook returns to its roots. It’s all about connections and bringing individuals together.

As many have already posited, this isn’t new. Parse.ly noted a decline in traffic to publisher links from Facebook in November. We noted the slowdown as early as April 2016, while other, more engaging formats like native videos were emphasized.

However, some publisher Pages are already asking their followers to change user settings, to spare them from the algorithm changes.

We decided to get away from all of the speculation and take a look at what we do best — data. Let’s get down to what the impact has been.

What’s going to go viral

What goes viral will continue to go viral. Stories go viral because of people, not so much because of algorithms.

Sharing happens across web, platforms, email, the ominously-named “dark social”. LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, etcetera — content creators have been diversifying their strategy to match.

In the roughly two weeks since the announcement, we decided to analyze what’s top across Facebook for web links, and what percentage of engagements came from other notable platforms.

For Facebook, power has shifted away from the publishers’ Facebook Pages, to the inherent virality of the content itself. Most publishers only get about 50 percent of the engagement of their site content through their Page engagement. The rest comes from “personal sharing”, the stories you or a friend found on the web and shared yourselves.

Spark a conversation

According to Facebook’s Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed, content that sparks meaningful discourse and longer comments at that, will receive more distribution.

We’ve already considered comments more valuable than likes, but now this is truer than ever. Looking at the top 100 Facebook posts from January 2016 onwards, we decided to compare the comments as the percentage of total engagements.

We can see there is a significant shift. In January 2016, comments only accounted for 3.36 percent of a top Facebook post’s engagements, on average. There was a “Trump bump” in January 2017 that mellowed out. But since the algorithm change, this number has skyrocketed to 11 percent.

What trends can we see in what currently drives comments?

As to the content with the highest percentage of comments, this hasn’t changed substantially from January 2017 to June 2017 to now. Here are the posts with the highest percentage of comments since the News Feed announcement:

Live video, particularly politically-charged ones or breaking news, see the biggest share of comments. Beyond the top ten, weird news and relatable videos also see a high percentage of comments, as well as total comments.

The Daily Mail has been notably strong with its Facebook Page over the past year, and engaging videos are a part of that:

This video, with 74,000 comments as of January 23rd, saw many of those come from people sharing their own stories and thoughts about the video:

What to know about native content: emotions, emotions, emotions

According to the Facebook Journalism Project lead, Campbell Brown, the News Feed change will not affect links to publisher content shared by friends.

This also isn’t as drastic a drop as it’s being considered. According to Zuckerberg, the drop of news in the News Feed has only gone from 5 percent to 4 percent visibility. So either way, just relying on your Facebook Page for visibility in the news feed, hasn’t worked for quite a while now.

Even Facebook video, the golden child of Facebook formats, may end up also being deprioritized if it doesn’t lead to meaningful engagements. Let’s take a look at the top content since the change:

We can really see how comments are playing a role in the top posts. UNILAD had two posts where comments were more than 15 percent and 21 percent of their total engagements. The publisher’s content tends to be either relatable or shows the viewer something crazy and different.

Overall, the most engaging content can elicit an emotional response. We’ve written previously on this trend, and it appears to be a best practice that is evergreen.

The year ahead

According to Pew, almost half of Americans rely on Facebook for news. This algorithm change will almost certainly impact how people distribute and consume news. There are several other developments that will weigh into this.

Being able to trust the content on platforms is still critical, in the continual fight against junk news. Facebook has announced plans to rank news publishers by their trustworthiness. Edelman’s most recent Trust Barometer report found that trust in journalism is actually on the rise.

This suggests the current change may not be quite as dire for publishers as it’s been perceived.