Face­book announced it was end­ing a news feed test called the Explore Feed. The test allowed users to choose from two news feeds. One feed was ded­i­cat­ed to friends and fam­i­ly. The sec­ond feed was for pub­lic pages. End­ing the test sig­nals that Face­book is com­mit­ted to the new­ly updat­ed Face­book feed. That may be bad news for busi­ness­es and oth­er orga­ni­za­tions who have seen their traf­fic lev­els plum­met with Facebook’s cur­rent news feed.

The test began in Octo­ber 2017. It was designed to help Face­book mem­bers see more friends and fam­i­ly in their news feed. But mem­ber feed­back indi­cat­ed they were less sat­is­fied with their feeds. The announce­ment was made by Adam Mosseri, head of Face­book News Feed.

“The Explore Feed was a tri­al response to con­sis­tent feed­back we received from peo­ple over the past year who said they want to see more from friends and fam­i­ly in News Feed. The idea was to cre­ate a ver­sion of Face­book with two dif­fer­ent News Feeds: one as a ded­i­cat­ed place with posts from friends and fam­i­ly and anoth­er as a ded­i­cat­ed place for posts from Pages.”

Face­book announced it was end­ing a news feed test called the Explore Feed. The test allowed users to choose from two news feeds. One feed was ded­i­cat­ed to friends and fam­i­ly. The sec­ond feed was for pub­lic pages. End­ing the test sig­nals that Face­book is com­mit­ted to the new­ly updat­ed Face­book feed. That may be bad news for busi­ness­es and oth­er orga­ni­za­tions who have seen their traf­fic lev­els plum­met with Facebook’s cur­rent news feed.

The test began in Octo­ber 2017. It was designed to help Face­book mem­bers see more friends and fam­i­ly in their news feed. But mem­ber feed­back indi­cat­ed they were less sat­is­fied with their feeds. The announce­ment was made by Adam Mosseri, head of Face­book News Feed.

“The Explore Feed was a tri­al response to con­sis­tent feed­back we received from peo­ple over the past year who said they want to see more from friends and fam­i­ly in News Feed. The idea was to cre­ate a ver­sion of Face­book with two dif­fer­ent News Feeds: one as a ded­i­cat­ed place with posts from friends and fam­i­ly and anoth­er as a ded­i­cat­ed place for posts from Pages.”

What This Means for Businesses with Facebook Pages

This news con­firms that Face­book is sat­is­fied with the direc­tion they are tak­ing and will con­tin­ue with the new algo­rithm. For busi­ness­es depen­dent on Face­book traf­fic this means under­stand­ing how Facebook’s new algo­rithm works and to imple­ment changes to adapt.

Will Facebook’s New Algorithm Revert Back?

Face­book has a his­to­ry con­tin­u­al­ly refin­ing their news feed. This new feed algo­rithm will prob­a­bly con­tin­ue to evolve. In fact, this focus on friends and fam­i­ly is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a news feed algo­rithm announced in 2016, that was intend­ed to increase the vis­i­bil­i­ty of news “post­ed by the friends you care about… high­er up in your News Feed.”

So yes, it’s quite like­ly Facebook’s algo­rithm will con­tin­ue to evolve. But no, it very like­ly will not revert back to the pre­vi­ous algo­rithm. So it’s fair­ly safe to assume that the old busi­ness mod­el of rely­ing on pas­sive con­sump­tion of viral con­tent for traf­fic has quite pos­si­bly come to an end. Pas­sive con­sump­tion of con­tent was named by Mark Zucker­berg him­self as one of the things Face­book want­ed to decrease in his Jan­u­ary 2018 announcement:

“I announced a major change to encour­age mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tions with fam­i­ly and friends over pas­sive consumption.”

Accord­ing to Facebook’s lat­est announcement:

“We think our recent changes to News Feed that pri­or­i­tize mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tions bet­ter address the feed­back we heard from peo­ple who said they want to see more from friends and fam­i­ly. Those changes mean less pub­lic con­tent in News Feed like posts from busi­ness­es, brands, and media.”

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