It’s Not Who You Know, But How Much You Pay
In November of 2014, Facebook publicly announced that they would restrict the throughput of content updates from brands on the social network via its News Feed algorithm. Then, in April of this year, they announced further changes to News Feed that would place greater priority on content posted by friends of users and the pages that users follow directly. Consequently, brands are still able to directly interact through content with current users, those who follow their pages, but have limited access to new users via indirect contact through likes and comments. While Facebook stated that the primary motivation for these changes was the improvement of user experience, it has been proposed by those outside the company, including the author of the following linked article on the impact of the News Feed algorithm changes on media, that these decisions were all part of a larger business plan to leverage the social network into the world’s most effective and profitable advertising platform.
Controlling users’ access to brand content through the News Feed algorithm allows Facebook to commodify the entire social network by creating an unlimited market for promoted or paid content. Facebook charges brands to ‘boost’ their content to the top of select user’s News Feeds in order to increase the number of users they reach. These select users represent the local bridges between large sets of users that do not interact closely that prove to be so valuable to the brands. Realizing the inherent value of these structural holes in the network, Facebook has built a major component of its business model on the ‘strength of weak ties’ theory.
What Facebook’s Algorithm Change Means for Brands, Publishers, and the Future of Media