Facebook Newsfeed Change: the 5 stages of grief in tweets

Just in case you missed it, Facebook just made a BIG algorithm change. Journo Twitter is busy passing through the stages of grief…

Denial

Facebook engagement decline has been happening all of last year for big publishers across Europe.

I'm cautiously, trepidatiously perhaps, quite welcoming of moves to improve the news feed. In time, a healthier news feed is better for quality news publishers.

— Steve E-S (@Stiff) January 12, 2018

Anger

Don't underestimate the possibility that Facebook is turning on publishers before publishers figure out how to turn on Facebook.

— Dan Primack (@danprimack) January 12, 2018

It's a good thing the publishing industry didn't have spent the last 5 years chasing short-term FB traffic and instead thought long term by building owned distribution channels, figuring out personalization and focussing on loyal readers rather than drive-by ones https://t.co/2PVh02qPNk

— Ryan Singel (@rsingel) January 12, 2018

Bargaining

What if my friends and family don't share much…as increasingly seems to be the casehttps://t.co/Mx3K3g1jkz

— Esther Kezia Thorpe (@EstherKeziaT) January 12, 2018

Zuck's changes to Facebook's news feed looks likely to try to encourage publishers to use its groups functionalityhttps://t.co/SXcCMLouq4

— Tim Gatt (@TimGatt) January 12, 2018

So many publishers think they have audiences, when what they really have is traffic.

I think we’re about to find out who has an audience

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) January 12, 2018

Here's an interesting dilemma:

Facebook says it will downgrade posts from business pages and promote posts from groups into the news feed.

Naturally, businesses will start creating a lot more groups. We're seeing this today.

What will FB do then?

— Richard Millington (@RichMillington) January 12, 2018

How publishers will react:
🔵 Facebook Groups prioritised
🔵 More journalists will be encouraged to have public profile pages
🔵 "Tell us what you think in the comments!"
(See also: @infinite_scream) https://t.co/vkWMCgkm32

— Lara O'Reilly (@larakiara) January 12, 2018

Depression

RIP Organic reach on Facebook. Died Jan 11th 2018. The Facebook organic reach memorial fund will happily accept donations via your Facebook Business Manager account or Promoted Posts. Pay to play on FB. https://t.co/9nHylQnB22 pic.twitter.com/nuUbSztdAk

— Andrew Bruce Smith (@andismit) January 12, 2018

Facebook's pursuit of news content can be viewed as a vestige of its war with Twitter. Facebook won that war. Twitter owns news now and Facebook is okay with it. Meanwhile, news content brought Facebook a lot of grief. So it doesn't mind deprioritizing it.

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) January 12, 2018

Acceptance

Publishers using Facebook in 2018 pic.twitter.com/KDWeMd9ZEd

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) January 11, 2018

Ben White