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Facebook tests a new explorer feed in 5 countries including mine. And it's not good! (26)

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Not sure if you are aware of it, since I didn't see much coverage in the EN speaking world, but Facebook is conducting a test in 5 countries, including Slovakia.

The main change is that they've split the main feed into 2, one is still the news feed and the new one has been named "explore feed". See screen below :



Now to the fun part, the original news feed now shows content posted by your friends only, plus ads of course. The posts from pages are all moved to the explore feed, so obviously, they get get way lower exposure now. If I understand it right, in order for some page post to appear in the news feed, some of your friends has to share it or interact with it in some way. Based on a few days of usage, I can confirm that I see WAY less pages content in the news feed, it's gone from the most part.

To make things worse, the number of posts in the explore feed seems to be limited, not sure if it's some bug or they plan to start charging for showing more ...

Ever since the change took effect, FB pages admins are complaining left and right, everyone's reach pretty much tanked. Everyone is doing whatever possible to educate people about the change... radio stations are airing this several times a day, to remind their fans to check out their pages in the separate feed now

Really curious about the outcome of this, it's still a test, so I expect several tweaks to be rolled out on the go.

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It's not good for pages you mean, but for advertising I think it will increase ctr's and overall amount of clicks, don't ya?

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This is going to MURDER organic reach for companies and brands.

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Same in Serbia, but friend of mine who has 400k page (that's lot for Serbia) didn't notice drop in reach, while lot's of others did. Definitely a way for Facebook to push companies relying only on organic reach into advertising.

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Hard to say, it's not like there is less ads now in the main newsfeed, it's the same pretty much. For now, you can't purchase ads in the explore feed, so no new opportunity for paid ads either. I don't run anything in Slovakia, so can't really put some numbers on the table.

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Yup, Serbia is another of the 6 countries ... so that makes it Slovakia, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cambodia and Srilanka ... not sure how they came up with a mix like this I think not every single user has been updated to the new interface, it takes some time, plus the full effect will be visible after a few days, but so far, I see a lot of page admins complaining about the new reach.

I just found a graph, published in a newspaper, it shows the number of FB interactions for 60 large websites in Slovakia, it's from the CrowdTangle tool.



The dip on the day of launch is quite massive.

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This reminds me of YouTube's changes, when a subscriber doesn't always get the videos in their feed and email, and you need to request notifications too - which is basically like a second subscription.

There's a lot of competition for limited attention - companies like FB and YouTube certainly want to make brands pay to reach that attention.

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Seeing lot of pages here moving their content to instagram, that may be the trend with other as well. We'll see how will that affect us. Maybe they don't even introduce it to Tier 1 countries, guess this is just a test.

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Yup, it is just a test, that's why they picked small countries to execute it in ... but Facebook officials are all quiet and don't want to give out any information other than that it's a test in 6 countries So hard to say how long it's gonna run and whether it stays the way it is now.

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The organic traffic bait and switch playbook ...

This is why, perversely, paid traffic can be more stable than organic traffic.

At least when you pay for traffic there is a closer alignment of incentives ... With organic traffic there is very little ...

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I already have explorer feed in my phone app.
Its kinda like divided the app into the friends newsfeed section and the page newsfeed section lol.

They rolled it in India and almost all my friends have it. So they are testing on a billion people at scale

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The same tricks as Google is using; more ad-space above the fold and less organic. (=> equals more revenue)

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Damn, so looks like they mean it ... whats the reaction to it across the board? Everyone hates it so far in Slovakia, both page admins and regular users.

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From techcrunch >>>Facebook downplays test banishing all Pages to buried Explore Feed

https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/23/facebook-page-feed/

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Official response from Facebook:
https://media.fb.com/2017/10/23/clar...-recent-tests/

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I dont know any page admins, but only a few close 8 friends or so. None of them are actually even checking explorer feed, they have enough stuff to check out in the normal feed.

But I will just make a status update in social media and a few whatsapp groups and see what everyone thinks. If there are any replies, I will report back.

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So basically only friends and advertisers on your feed from now on.

I guess i should have had more friends...

HUGE hit for companies that relied on non promoted posts. You wanna be seen on FB you gotta pay.
I wonder how FB users will react to this as they are now officially being treated as cash cows without even seeing the content they have opted in to.

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Based on reactions I saw from people, everyone is upset about the change, because the truth is, there is only so much puppies, food and kids photos you can handle in a day ... after all, they want to see the content from the pages that they like.

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great way to boost profits for q1 this is a good thing for us who pay for fb ads

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Not sure if it's good for you ... page admins will be forced to buy more ads in order to keep their reach, which should translate into higher traffic prices in the long run ... more money for FB, while playing the usual "user experience" BS card

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That is a solid possibility.

Basically this new reality will eliminate the need to build a community around your FB page as your non sponsored posts will not even be shown.

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The non-sponsored posts will still make it to the regular newsfeed, if someone likes or comments on them, so it might be enough to buy a boost at the beginning. Still, it's extra expense that wasn't needed until now. It's also possible that people will learn to browse the explorer feed and the impact won't be so drastic - it will take users some time to get used to this change though.

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Nah, It'll actually probably be a good thing. Short term graphs show drop in reach, but in the long term I think people would start to ignore the regular feed. People don't give a flying fuck about what their friends and family post on FB. They go there to watch stupid videos and argue in comment sections.

Companies I partner directly with like Littlethings, Render, AWM, etc. doubt it'll even ever go live within the US.

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My suspicion is that this won't make it into the default FB, because it's so divisive for users.

Some people will be thrilled with it, sure. But a lot of others will be very unhappy, and far worse than that, a significant number of them will stop paying attention to their feed because of it. Rather than consuming all the content as they do now, people will either follow one feed or the other, or in some cases neither.

That's doubly bad for FB because if they're not paying attention to their entire feed, not only does FB lose ad views, but it also means they're generating less content on that feed, which means everyone else pays less attention too.

I could be wrong - I don't have their data. But this looks like a scary experiment that won't make its way into full production without some modification.

Some change is probably coming to organic reach for pages, though.

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Without any doubt, they are just aiming to increase competition, making more space for paid ads and increase revenue. However isolating all the non-ad posts and pages will kill the user feed experience and engagement (+ the users are getting smarter and educated), they will have to balance it for sure. There's also a good chance that in terms of UI and UX they will deliver a better way to switch between the feeds, this way it will be much more native to the user and the negative affect in terms of reach to non followed pages and posts will be lower.

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They will definitely release several tweaks and try to cross publish stuff between the two feeds, I've already seen some changes in the way the feed operates. FB also started to post "notices" that the pages content is in a separate feed now, I guess users were complaining and not everyone found the explorer feed ... let's how they move on with the test.

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