Say bye bye to your grumpy cat meme’s, at least according to Facebook.
Well the day has finally come; our obsession with grumpy cats and funny meme’s on the Internet may no longer show up in our Facebook Newsfeed. You may be asking yourself “What tragedy happened to create such a horrible update like to happen? “ and believe me you are not the only one! Earlier this week Facebook publicized an update to its Newsfeed algorithm which will support “high quality content” i.e. news articles over of memes, comics or other non-informative links.
Below is a statement as to why this change has come about:
“Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme. Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile. This means that high quality articles you or others read may show up a bit more prominently in your News Feed, and meme photos may show up a bit less prominently. “
In addition to news article links appearing higher and more often in the newsfeed, Facebook will also start to implement recommending similar articles to the ones they click on by using predictive analytics. This is a stroke of luck for media sites, as this will definitely increase engagement and traffic referrals coming from Facebook. It turns out that Facebook is where most people are getting their news in the first place, so using predictive analytics to help recommend relevant articles is just the sensible next step for them.
Facebook will also try to ramp up even more activity surrounding these links, as it will sporadically resurface articles you have clicked or saw in your feed when your friends comment on an article, which potentially could result in more engagement from you to as well.
This new improvement to Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm is bound to make any media site like Blogs, news, sports and entertainment sites pretty happy. But what does this new mean for the fate of our favorite and hilarious cat-memes? Now that they’ll be banished to the bottom of our newsfeed, does this mean more people might actually use the Internet to READ? Only time and analytics from Facebook will be able to tell us that!
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Posted In: Marketing Tips