How Facebook’s Newsfeed Change is Affecting Advertisers
If you have been running Facebook Ads recently, you may have noticed a couple of changes.
Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out a major update to their newsfeed algorithm. This change looked to prioritise posts from a user’s family and friends over posts by advertisers and brands.
At the time, Zuckerberg made the somewhat bold assertion that these changes will lead to people actually spending less time on Facebook. While this may sound like bad news for advertisers, with impressions declining and the costs of Ads rising as a result of Ad real estate becomes scarcer, it is a necessary change which should lead to higher quality engagement with your target market.
Why this Was a Necessary Change
Monetising a free platform like Facebook is a balancing act. Throw too many Ads and sponsored content at users and you create a poor experience which will inevitably drive people away.
Addressing this, Zuckerberg commented that, “we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content… is crowding out the personal moments”.
“Some measures of engagement will go down – but I expect the time spent on Facebook will be more valuable.”
The idea is that, through seeing more posts from family and friends, it will foster greater engagement with content in our feeds so that, when an Ad does appear, we will then be more likely to engage with it. Facebook is attempting to strike a balance for both users and advertisers making interaction with brands more relevant and meaningful.
However, the direct consequence of this change is that Facebook Ad impressions are dropping and the costs of Ads are rising – currently 29% higher than last year. While this may sound like bad news on paper, it may not be all doom and gloom for Facebook advertisers.
How Your Business Can Take Advantage of this Change
While in the past, Facebook ads were seen as a way to get your brand or product out to a huge amount of people at a relatively small cost, it could be said that the broad blanket approach led to a lot of irrelevant (and sometimes negative) user engagement.
Now, with Ad space becoming more competitive, those who are willing to pay should see a greater rate of engagement with the content they put out. So it could be argued that the quality of Facebook advertising is improving and with a big number of smaller players dropping out due to the increasing cost of Facebook ads, you will get a leg-up over your competition by implementing a Facebook campaign.
