What Facebook Changes Mean for Brands

When Facebook announced changes to the site at the F8 Developers Conference in September, brands were unsure what the new revamp would mean for them.

Now, six weeks later, analytics firm PageLever has released the results of a study finding that the changes made to the Newsfeed boosted brands’ visibility among more of their fans and increased fan engagement, but decreased the frequency with which those fans see brand messages.

The changes to the Newsfeed include an update to their algorithm that determines the stories users view, a constantly updating “live ticker,” a layout which now includes a “Top Stories” and “Recent Stories” section, as well as the option users now have to influence what they see in the newsfeed my marking posts.

“I would say it’s actually much better for brands now,” said Jeff Widman, co-founder of PageLever, as reported by AdAge. “As a marketer, I’d totally rather reach more people every day than the same people more often.”

The study, which analyzed data from 300 brand pages with between 100,000 and 1 million fans, found that while total fan views of brand pages fell slightly by 0.4% on average, unique views (or how many individuals viewed the page) increased by a staggering 24%.

During the study, brands also saw an 18% increase in stories or comments created about brands by their fans or friends, which would imply that fans are more engaged after these changes.

Unfortunately, total views and unique views of those stories fell by 50% and 26%, respectively.

This suggests that the revised Facebook newsfeed algorithm gives fan and friend interaction with brands little visibility in the newsfeed and should make brands reevaluate the weight they give the viral-ness of their messaging in the measurements.

But where they might not rely so heavily on the viral-ness of their messages, brands can now rely more heavily on their own messaging that appears in the newsfeed.

The Ticker, where users can see brand and friend activity, increased fan clicks and “likes” for brand content by 152%. It should be noted, however, that the enormous increase came from small group since the number of unique users clicking on brand content only grew by 20%.

That speaks to the idea that these users, no matter how many there are, are more engaged with brand content than they were prior to the changes and, since the changes have not been rolled out to all Facebook users, it implies that the group of engaged users may grow in the future.

The data from the study was mixed on how the changes were affecting fan acquisitions, with the average brand page staying fairly constant in terms of new fans from before the changes to after.

What is less clear is how other F8 changes, like the roll out of the new Timeline profile, will affect brand pages.

What does this mean for Marketers?

As marketing strategies continue to add more emphasis on social media, and Facebook in particular, it is important that those creating the strategies realize just how much the changes made to algorithms and layouts effect how their messages are received by fans. 

In this case, it seems that the updates made by Facebook really benefit brands. While it decreases frequency, it increases reach and engagement, which are key metrics for marketers.

Because this, and the fact that viral-ness of brand messaging seems to decrease slightly with this new algorithm, brands must be careful about crafting their messages, they must message more often and they will need to focus on acquisition centered campaigns, as acquiring more fans will be the easiest way to get more eyes on brand messaging.