Facebook’s latest News Feed tweaks are creating ripples of commotion across the industry. Users will soon see a change in their Facebook News Feed. Facebook emphasized that the News Feed is all about “connecting people with their family and friends”. With this change, users will be able to see updates from family and friends over brands. Facebook is making this change because it seems that people are worried about missing out on important updates from their family and friends; since all they see is the massive amount of articles, videos, and memes that people share. This change will have little impact on day-to-day users of Facebook, but it will most likely affect businesses and media outlets that rely on Facebook for customer engagement.
So will this hurt your referral traffic? Sadly, yes. If posts from family and friends are now the most important “ranking signal”, then Facebook posts by brands and publishers will go down in the News Feed. These posts will show up less frequently, resulting in less traffic to the hundreds of media sites that have come to rely on Facebook News Feed. Facebook has already warned publishers that this update will definitely cause organic reach and referral traffic to drop. It suggests that if you want visibility for your brand or business, you’ll have to promote through Facebook Ads.