Facebook
doesn't seem to be worried about losing advertisers. Their announcement last
week regarding newsfeeds just made everything official for business owners: no
more freeloading.
Well,
actually they said it was the users themselves who are saying they don't want
promotional posts on their news feeds. And Facebook being the user-loving
social network that it is, readily heeded their request.
Starting
January next year, posts from brands that their algorithm deem as too
promotional won't make it to any feed.
According
to Facebook's survey of half a million users, they would rather not have
'promotional' posts cluttering their newsfeeds. Apparently, users complained of
many junk posts in their feeds and asked to see more updates from their
personal friends on that space instead.
"What
we discovered is that a lot of the content people see as too promotional is
posts from Pages they like, rather than ads. We're responding to what people
want to see," Facebook said on its blog post.
Obviously
the average user would prefer to see more content from their friends (the
reason they signed up in the first place) but this spells bad news for brands
on Facebook.
"It's
a clear message to brands: If you want to sound like an advertiser, buy an
ad," said a media analyst from Altimeter Group.
For the
last 2 years, they have been tweaking the algorithm which is responsible for
choosing what a user sees in his/her feed, in a bid to cut back on 'junk'
posts. So this is yet another blow for businesses who are just getting used to
the EdgeRank (the algorithm that decides which supposed organic posts of a
brand will eventually show up in a user's feed). If previously they were highly
doubting whether their posts ever reach the eyes of users, now they are sure
they won't.
Fortunately,
the announcement came with some guidelines on what their algorithm will deem
too promotional:
- posts
that just push people to purchase something or install an app
- posts
that entice people to enter sweepstakes and other promotionas with no real
context
- posts
that just rehash the same content from advertisements
As a
result, companies will obviously be obliged to avail of Facebook's advertising
system. Talk about subtle arm-twisting. It won't be a surprise if their ad
prices suddenly increased, too. (Case in point: In the last quarter, Facebook
reportedly increased their ad revenue by 64%, ergo their ad prices also
increased by 274%, compared to last year's prices.)
Companies
might get skeptical that Facebook could be deliberately pushing them towards
paid ads -- and no one could blame them. It's is rather hard to swallow that
the expected increase of ad revenue is just a very fortunate side effect.
Facebook
vice president Brian Boland insisted that these changes, contrary to popular
belief, are simply to make their users happy and not to rake more profits from
the expected increase of ad revenue.
So if
Facebook is nudging brands away from organic posts to traditional
advertisements, does this mean users are going to get bombarded with equally
annoying adverts? The rest of the Facebook users might find assurance in their
statement that "this change will not increase the number of ads people see
in their News Feeds."
Facebook
seems to be moving farther away from social
marketing and turning into a place to buy traditional
advertisements. If so, then it's too bad as it will surely stifle creativity in
doing subtle social marketing.
They might
mean well for the users in general -- they want to give users more pictures of
their friends' dinner and family trips, we get that -- but what about those
users who are deliberately keeping tabs on businesses? Surely they're not going
to be forced to endure personal pictures of their 'friends' when they came
there to hear from companies?
0 comments:
Post a Comment