• by Andy Barr , Op-Ed Contributor, January 16, 2018

Social media land has barely had a chance to turn its New Year "out of office" off before Facebook came along with the first big bombshell of 2018.

Brands are increasingly growing wary of headlines that scream "Facebook delivers an update," because it will inevitably mean that they will have to cough up more money in order to get in front of their desired audience, and this latest update is no different.

Everyone’s favourite social media platform dressed up a significant change, that will detrimentally affect media outlets and brands, as a move designed to bring friends and families closer together. A stroke of communications genius by Facebook! 

The changes mean that we can all get that fuzzy feeling inside from reading even more about the amazing things that our friends and family are doing without being inundated with those dirty, clickbait, media headlines. 

Brands, and the vast majority of media outlets, will now have their content shunted into the sidelines and out of our news feed. There will be some that earn a place in the news feed based on the volume of shares and various other Zuck-based algorithms, and with this will come attempts to “game” the algo -- but by and large, most brands will fall foul of the new rules.

On a far less cynical note, this also goes a long way toward helping to address “fake news” by pushing it into the Explore tab (eventually). Meanwhile, the cream of the crop of the most shared and engaged with media articles will still, as mentioned, sneak into our feeds. 

Brands and news media will be the biggest losers with this, both in terms of a loss of traffic and engagement, alongside an almost inevitable rise in costs for getting consumers’ eyes on their content. Is this a bad thing, though? Not for consumers -- and this is what some of us evil social media industry workers sometimes forget; what the end user wants is key.

The upshot of all this is that social media land, myself included, needs to work harder to make sure that our work earns its place in front of the very consumers that we want to target, rather than just firing content out and paying to get it in the right place.

Facebook -- and more importantly, consumers -- are not going to put up with shoddy content anymore, and this move may seem dramatic, but it positions Facebook well to withstand the challenge of social channels that simply present the content that the user wants to see.

All this said, Facebook updates are increasingly similar to Google updates in that what they say is often very far from the reality of what will happen. As such, we probably need to wait for the dust to settle to decipher what is actually going on. 

There will, no doubt, be a mini trial of various changes across a small subset of users, typically in an area that won’t get much attention, and this is what we will all be looking for and wanting to be the first to spot and shout about. What a time to be alive.

TLDR: prepare to see even more pictures of your mate’s children doing oh-so-funny things and poorly shot videos of a work colleague’s pets in compromising positions, but this time without stories from LADbible and UNILAD in between.