The New Facebook Changes Will Take You Back to Simpler Times

In an effort to improve the site, the new Facebook changes are designed to increase user-to-user interaction and reduce the creepy feeling of being spied on.

Face­book just announced the new changes to its news­feed and it has many adver­tis­ers wor­ried. In a post, Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg announced on Jan. 11, that its users will now “see less pub­lic con­tent like posts from busi­ness­es, brands and media. And the pub­lic con­tent you see more will be held to that stan­dard.” So, what exact­ly are these new Face­book changes?

Well, on your news­feed, you will now see more posts from your friends and any groups you joined instead of adver­tise­ments from dif­fer­ent brands and media, in order to pro­mote “mean­ing­ful inter­ac­tions between peo­ple.” That sounds pret­ty nice, right?

Face­book is one of the world’s largest dis­trib­u­tors of news and online ads, which explains why your news­feed might be clut­tered with seem­ing­ly irrel­e­vant adver­tise­ments. It may be annoy­ing, but com­pa­nies are spend­ing a lot of mon­ey to get you to see their con­tent. A lot of mon­ey. Even though Face­book may seem like a reg­u­lar social media site, it gen­er­ates over $1 bil­lion per quar­ter in adver­tis­ing rev­enue, with its biggest spenders being Wal­mart, Ford and McDonald’s.

And these com­pa­nies do it ever so sub­tly too, so you prob­a­bly aren’t even aware that they are sell­ing you things in the first place. For exam­ple, they’ll spend about $1–$5 to put an adver­tise­ment in the side­bar — yes, that side­bar that nobody even looks at — or they’ll put out a dai­ly pro­mot­ed post that costs around $5 per 1,000 peo­ple direct­ly on your news­feed, which could include a short video or an eye-catch­ing picture.

Why would any com­pa­ny spend that type of mon­ey on a social media site where peo­ple either don’t pay atten­tion to the adver­tise­ments or just scroll through them with­out a sec­ond glance? Well, because Face­book has over 1.2 bil­lion active users every month who are con­stant­ly check­ing Face­book, so that is a huge tar­get audience.

With that big of an audi­ence, com­pa­nies can grow their brand aware­ness and make a lot of mon­ey in the process. The com­put­er com­pa­ny Dell has made more than $9 mil­lion in Face­book adver­tis­ing and Nes­tle has over 5 mil­lion likes on Face­book. Those are pret­ty insane num­bers for a social media site that was start­ed in a Har­vard dorm room.

While the new Face­book changes may have wor­ried some adver­tis­ers, com­pa­nies shouldn’t wor­ry too much about this update. Since, at its core, the shift is con­cerned with gen­er­at­ing more “mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tions,” com­pa­nies were going to have to rethink how they were going to inter­act with con­sumers any­way; now they have the com­fort of know­ing that the adver­tis­ing isn’t going away, it’s just chang­ing its appearance.

Facebook’s vice pres­i­dent of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, said in an inter­view with Stat­e­ch­ery, “So if you and I had a back and forth con­ver­sa­tion on a post from a Page, that would actu­al­ly count as a mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tion.” So, Face­book isn’t try­ing to end all paid pro­mo­tion, they just want them to have more pur­pose than throw­ing an adver­tise­ment on your news­feed for no rea­son. More mean­ing­ful posts will get favored in the News Feed and com­pa­ny posts that aren’t get­ting a lot of traf­fic won’t be in the News Feed.

The new Face­book changes not only affect adver­tis­ers, but also polit­i­cal cam­paignsbecause now their videos will show up less on the News Feed, unless they pay for spon­sored posts. Polit­i­cal par­ties might be forced to change how they per­form social media cam­paigns and how much mon­ey they spend on dig­i­tal advertisements.

But, again, politi­cians should look at these changes as a way to engage with their audi­ence instead of spew­ing infor­ma­tion at them. “Politi­cians will have to spend more time engag­ing with peo­ple, rather than engag­ing at them,” said Dean Tester, a dig­i­tal media strate­gist for con­ser­v­a­tive politicians.

Politi­cians can use this oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect with their audi­ence by doing live videos, cre­at­ing their own Face­book pages, inter­act­ing with their sup­port­ers via Mes­sen­ger or engag­ing read­ers in the com­ment sec­tion of a post.

What the New Face­book Changes Mean for Users

These changes are poten­tial­ly great for the every­day users because Face­book is going back to its roots. Before the social media site became a leader in the realm, Face­book was just a sim­ple social net­work­ing site. Peo­ple could go on, make a pro­file, talk to friends and post pic­tures to show their clos­est friends. It was sim­ple and that was the charm.

You could safe­ly go on Face­book with­out being slammed with adver­tise­ments on your feed. You could actu­al­ly see posts that you want­ed to see, such as your long-lost high school friend get­ting mar­ried, your fam­i­ly mem­bers post­ing pic­tures from the hol­i­days or your friend com­ment­ing some­thing sil­ly on your wall to cre­ate a back and forth.

It was inter­ac­tive and fun to go on Face­book instead of what it is like today. When peo­ple go on Face­book today, it is like they become zom­bies with mean­ing­less adver­tise­ments every­where. You prob­a­bly have to scroll through about five adver­tise­ments before you can see a post from some­one you actu­al­ly know.

Per­haps these new Face­book changes will min­i­mize the zom­bie-like behav­ior and force peo­ple to revert back to their old Face­book ways of fight­ing in the com­ment sec­tion, writ­ing obscene things on peo­ple walls and gen­er­at­ing healthy debates on posts.