Publishers set to take a traffic hit as Facebook changes its news feed algorithm
Facebook appears to have struck a blow to publishers’ and brands’ reach on its platform with an announcement overnight it will prioritise posts from friends further on its news feed.
In an update overnight Facebook engineering director Lars Blackstrom warned he anticipates the update “may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages”, warning those hardest hit would be people who rely on traffic coming from direct page posts.
He wrote: “The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.
