What Facebook's Algorithm Change Means?

Facebook has an identity crisis, it wants to be everything to everyone.

Unfortunately just when you were enjoying getting your News on Facebook, they have tweaked the algorithm to receive more updates from friends, family and personal contacts. This will reduce the algorithm's efficacy for publishers and brands. 

• The tweak prioritizes users' posts from friends and family higher.

Instagram's Algorithm also Favors Big Brands

Recently Instagram (owned by Facebook) also tweaked its algorithms to favor the most engaging posts, where posts no longer appear in chronological order, what some people were calling the death of Instagram for brands. 

Facebook Trying to Combat Decline of Personal Sharing

Facebook must be scared, it's alienated actual people and use of the platform as a social way to stay in touch with family and friends, as according to The Information, as of mid-2015, personal and "original" sharing was down 21% year-over-year. That's a huge drop in authentic content, with viral videos and memes running amok. 

Facebook staff, tasked with sorting out the problem has coined a term for the decline in intimacy called context collapse.

Meanwhile for MAU (monthly active users), Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr and SMS chat apps, continue to grow at a terrific rates. Being an early solution to the platform of everything race, Facebook could afford to go for quantity over quality and the same seems to be occurring with Instagram. Snapchat meanwhile, is on another level of innovation and truly the successor to video content for communication, advertising and branding. 

Recent Algorithm Change Hurts Publishers and Brands 

With the recent tweak, they run the risk of alienating publishers and brands as well. Organic reach on Facebook is already very low (has been in a steady decline for years), as the number of likes a page has now matters less and less.

Organic Reach on Facebook is Already Dead

According to Locowise, the average reach for a post was 2.6% as of the Spring of 2015. Think about this for a moment: 

Of the 2.6 percent of users pages reached with a Facebook post by a brand, only 1.83 percent engage with those posts, on average.

Is Facebook Live the Answer?

Meanwhile, Facebook is pushing its Facebook Live Video feature paying millions of dollars to celebrities to try and boost engagement.

Facebook will pay almost 140 parties to create live video for the burgeoning service.

There's some indication it's losing the video content battle to Snapchat and YouTube, no matter the high time online and head-start it has with regards to huge number of users and global reach.  

Dominant as a Traffic Referrer & Mobile Ad Champion 

However, Facebook is a "cash cow" for traffic referrals and made $5 Billion in digital ad revenue in 2015. According to Parsley, Facebook now accounts for 41.4% of referral traffic to news sites. So just as it got publishers in its pocket, it now is trying to win back actual people again. Facebook is following the money, and in spite of ad-blockers is earning huge profits from mobile ads. 

Facebook's share of revenue on desktop dropped 20 percentage points last year, while its share of mobile revenue went up 20 percentage points

Where do We go from Here?

In an age of information overload, declining attention spans and dropping time on apps across the board, Facebook still manages to be the starting place, as Amazon would for Ecommerce, and Google is for a question or quick information. These are the companies that increasingly, dominate the web. 

Facebook is an extreme example of algorithms at the service of monetization and not users. It feels it can do this by having such tremendous reach and dominance. However, nothing stays the same forever. It may be too little too late to revert to how users used Facebook years ago, as western users and in particular Millennials and iGen have migrated to SMS and Snapchat while the world waits for what comes after apps. 

In a world wide web increasingly being dominated by a handful of American tech companies, it's a very dangerous precedent for our digital free-will. The constant algorithm tweaking for how we consume content, is no longer just a matter of Google making changes SEO geeks were aware of, but for now algorithms are the intermediary for the every day user. 

Do you use Facebook differently today than in years past? How so? Do you think Facebook can be saved from "context collapse"?

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