So Dig Journalism

Within minutes of seeing the roll-out of the new Facebook news feed on Wednesday I knew the changes would hurt pages.  FB is taking all of your past use of FB to decide the order the posts you see on your FB news feed.  It seems FB is ranking Profiles over Pages.  

I noticed right away that if a Page I've liked has posted within a short amount of time before I logged in, that Page's post showed up towards the top in "Recent Stories."  Then I noticed I had to scroll way down on my news feed to find any other posts from Pages. 

I practically live on Pages that I administer.  I interact with Pages far more than I do real people (I know shame on me - but it's my job after all.)  Not even these Pages were ranking high enough to be towards the top of my news feed. 

But the FB news feed that rolled out in the morning was not the same by the time the night ended as FB was adjusting and tweaking the interface.  I decided to wait until this weekend and then look at hard numbers.

Sadly, I'm not surprised at all by the numbers:
9NEWS (KUSA) Facebook stats since the new FB news feed started include:

1st 24 hrs of new feed 9/21 - 9/22:
57% decrease in post views
2.9% increase of page likes
2% increase of post feedback
1,057 views of the 9NEWS Wall

9/21 - 9/24:
42% decrease in post views
37% increase of page likes.
11% decrease in post feedback
1,780 views of the 9NEWS wall

I checked the previous three Wednesday - Saturday trends (of Aug. 31 - Sept. 17) to compare to this week.  I found two of the weeks had only increases in all of the stats, no decreases. One week had a 4.8% decrease in post views. That's minimal compared to the 42% decrease seen this week.

What this means to me:

People are still finding and liking our page as the stats are right on for page likes. BUT our posts are low in priority for FB ranking so our posts aren't being seen like they used to be which seems to correlate with the decrease in post feedback and the views of the 9NEWS wall.

The purpose of FB is to connect you with people, but interacting with brands, companies, organizations, ie PAGES, is a vital part of this social network.  Pages create entire sub-communities of your personal community, much like the use of FB Groups does. This is a basis of social advocacy and commerce.  (I won't get into it, but want this on the record: FB may be free, but it's earning and creating plenty of actual, real money.  Our personal use is marketing rich data and if our interactions with Pages decreases due to the new wall, how will the marketing data change - make it richer since we'll only truly be seeing the Pages that really are important to us; or will data on the passive FB user who depended on Page posts on their wall be lost? Ok, so I did get into it a bit.)

Of course I'm biased and I'm sure there are many out there who wish to hear/see less from Pages.  To those people I say: unlike the page if it's annoying.  Just as you are managing your own social community, I'm managing the Page you have liked and I'm am working extremely hard to find the right balances to keep your "like" and to get your to read the posts, click on links, share posts and leave comments.  If I have failed you, I'm only going to work harder to get you back.

I hope FB continues to do what it is best at: making changes.  I hope the change brings some balance back to the ranking of Pages.  In the meantime, I will work harder to get you to click that blue corner tab to make Pages "Top Stories" so they don't get lost on your wall.