What the new Facebook news feed means for brands.

Facebook recently announced what could be the largest change up to your news feed in the history of the platform. This shift will fundamentally alter how you’ll use Facebook – but the biggest impact will be felt by brands and advertisers.

The new news feed will prioritize content shared by personal profiles, while showing less from businesses, news organizations, and celebrities. The idea is to make sure people see more posts that they actually “care about,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

So what does this mean for the future of businesses on Facebook?

Organic views and engagements for brand posts will drop, continuing an ongoing trend of “pay to play” across social platforms. However, this time the decrease will be significant: the news feed algorithm is designed to connect people, so posts shared by business pages will be deprioritized.

There is another equally impactful change coming to the news feed, which will penalize “engagement bait” posts that ask users to comment or share, vote, or tag a friend. This removes what was once a significant hack for generating organic engagements.

While these changes will make paid support a near necessity for branded content to succeed, the Facebook ad market will also become more competitive as more businesses turn to paid campaigns. Whether this will create significant changes to costs, or even to the affectiveness of paid campaigns overall, remains to be seen.

One possible solution for getting your brand content noticed in the new newsfeed? Employee advocacy. As we noted in our recap of social media trends for 2018, brand messaging reached 561% further on social when shared by employees rather than corporately owned accounts. With these platform changes at Facebook, having your brand content shared by personal profiles is more of a necessity than ever.