{"id":114090,"date":"2017-07-17T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T01:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/facebooks-crackdown-sharers-heres-businesses-need-know\/"},"modified":"2024-12-23T00:35:43","modified_gmt":"2024-12-23T05:35:43","slug":"facebooks-crackdown-sharers-heres-businesses-need-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/facebooks-crackdown-sharers-heres-businesses-need-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook\u2019s crackdown on over-sharers\u2026here\u2019s what businesses need to know"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a move that\u2019s very reminiscent of Google five or so years ago, Facebook has in the past few days made a big change to its News Feed algorithm which it says will “reduce the influence of…spammers” who routinely spread low-quality content. As a result, users who share 50-plus links publicly a day will be penalised, and have their content demoted automatically.<\/p>\n

Since last year, Facebook has been on a crackdown against the spread of misinformation and spam content across its network. This followed claims that it was helping to propagate the spread of fake news during the 2016 US presidential election. For example, according to Buzzfeed<\/a>, teens from a small town in Macedonia set up at least 100 US politics websites where aggressively pro-Trump content was published. To quote from the article directly, \u201cAs Facebook regularly reveals in\u00a0earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising \u2014 a declining market for American publishers \u2014 goes a long way in Veles [Macedonia]\u201d. So these youths found if they published sensationalist (and often false) content, it would generate traffic and shares on Facebook, which in turn would lead to click-throughs to their website, driving a sizeable return in ad revenue.<\/p>\n

Consequently, as Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president for the News Feed, shares in a blog post, \u201cwe want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers.\u201d<\/p>\n

What impact will this have for legitimate businesses and publishers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crucially, business pages remain free to post as much as they want as this change only scrutinises individual user accounts. Facebook has offered the assurance that most publishers won\u2019t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed. However it warns that \u201cpublishers that get meaningful distribution from people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day may see a reduction in the distribution of those specific links\u201d. Additionally, any reputable individuals who tend to share 50-plus times per day\u00a0will also be captured by the algorithm change, meaning they will no longer get the reach they used to.<\/p>\n

On the surface, this seems like quite a crude way of differentiating spam from quality content. To some extent Facebook must agree, and Mosseri says \u201cof course, this is only one signal among many others that may affect the ranking prioritization of this type of post. This update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facebook says it won\u2019t be manually looking at the content being distributed by these super-shares, as apparently, the correlation between these types of users and spammy content is so strong that it doesn\u2019t see the need to. But of course this leaves plenty of room for error, with the absence of any human moderation in place.<\/p>\n

Should businesses be worried about the change?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In brief…quite possibly! Importantly, the update is a reminder of the power Facebook holds within the social media space, with the ability to drastically alter its content distribution rules overnight (\u00e0 la Google!). Although the repercussions of this particular update will most likely be minimal for legitimate publishers, and the potential for more drastic changes in the future is worrying. If the same 50-plus rule is applied to business Pages, for example, the impact could be catastrophic for businesses, as it was when Google unleashed its Panda update several years ago.<\/p>\n

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