Facebook's relocation of Page posts causes drop of 60 to 80% referral traffic
24 Oct 2017
Facebook's decision to remove Page posts from the News Feed and relocate them to a separate, difficult to find Explore Feed due to a test, caused a 60 per cent to 80 per cent drop in referral traffic to news outlets in six countries. However, now Facebook's VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri writes that ''We currently have no plans to roll this test out further.'' It would, however, not mean that Facebook would not move forward with implementing a similar change more widely if users preferred their News Feed to be just posts from friends.
The Explore Feed Facebook recently launched, shows posts from Pages users do not follow, as also as other content like Events, Groups, Moments and Saved items. It can be only accessed from the More tab by most users, making it relatively hidden. However, Pages users do follow still had their best posts appear in their main News Feed.
But in the past week, Facebook tested a different version of the Explore Feed in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala and Cambodia, which took all non-ad Page posts out of the News Feed and put them in the much less visible Explore Feed.
The move caused some Pages to receive 4X less engagement than before. A selection of the top Facebook Pages in Slovakia lost two-thirds to three-fourths of their reach - the amount of users who saw their posts, according to Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle, The Guardian reported.
"The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it's an idea worth pursuing any further," said Mosseri.
"There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore."
According to commentators, Facebook makes frequent big and small changes as it tries to maximise the time people spend scrolling and browsing the network. At times it makes changes permanent, and other times not.