I have noted before that journalists and news organizations should be conversational in social media. Here’s another reason why: Facebook clusters autofeeds together in its News Feed, which means that fewer people might see them and click your links.
In a comment on my post about syncing Facebook and Twitter accounts, Graham Gudgin wrote:
But I think there’s another reason for doing this that you may have overlooked. Facebook seems to have recently “downgraded” status updates coming from other applications. For example, people who have set up their blogs to auto-post to Facebook have been reporting that, whereas they used to get plenty of comments on Facebook about their updates, they’re not getting them to the same degree. It is thought that Facebook is trying to encourage people engaging ON Facebook, so is not making these auto-updates from other applications quite as visible as before.
My personal experience seems to support this theory, and I’m now going to Facebook and linking to things like blog posts, instead of having them auto-update Facebook.
I asked Vadim Lavrusik, journalist program manager at Facebook, about this and he provided this response:
Posts that are posted from autofeeds get clustered in the News Feed. This has happened for some time and it has nothing to do with outside application and has everything to do how something is being posted (automated or authentic).
Authenticity tends to get more exposure because the content is seen as more valuable and so it is treated as such not only by the News Feed, but also how users respond to autofed stories. For example, in a study we did of how users interact with news organizations on Facebook, Pages that used autofeeds got 2-3X less engagement from users. Mostly such stories don’t get as much exposure because users don’t engage with them and the News Feed favors such engagement for wider distribution.
If something is posted via a third-party app but manually, it is treated the same as if it originated from Facebook.
The other factor is that some of these apps don’t use our API effectively. So for example a post with a link is posted as a status update rather than teaser with a link preview and so it doesn’t have the nice thumbnail image and link preview blurb. Posts with link previews that include a thumbnail image also get higher click-throughs, mostly because they include a visual component and users are more likely to notice them.
There’s a couple of factors involved, but the bottom line is that the structure favors authenticity, which usually means higher quality content.
Thanks to Vadim for that quick response. Tyler Machado of Seven Days in Vermont tells me on Twitter that this change is affecting traffic at his site:
https://twitter.com/#!/TylerMachado/status/121613195583569921
I’ve asked Tyler if his updates from apps are autofeeds.
Bottom line: Conversation means authenticity to Facebook (and Facebook users), so it’s probably worth the time to write a conversational update rather than autofeeding headlines and links.
First time I’ve been a tag in a WordPress blog! 😉
Having a picture next to your Facebook update seems to make an enormous difference.
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To elucidate my Tweet a little bit more: I’m usually the only person who mans the social media channels for Seven Days as a brand. I usually handcraft updates when I’m in the office (and when I’m out of the office, sometimes). I had set up an auto-feed through dlvr.it so that new blog posts that came in at night or on weekends would go to Facebook and Twitter automatically.
Initially the auto-posted items got similar numbers as the handcrafted posts, but in the last 3 weeks or so, the numbers went way down. (And so we’re clear: I expected engagement numbers to go down, since they’d come up as just the headline without a pithy little summary sentence in the post field. But we’re talking impressions too.) The auto-fed posts were getting 10%-50% the number of impressions as handcrafted posts. So I’ve stopped doing that.
Also worth mentioning that I also used Hootsuite occasionally to write a handcrafted post, but schedule it for a later time. I’ve also seen numbers go down on these posts, although not as dramatically as the dlvr.it autofeed.
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Thanks for clarifying, Tyler. I know of others who use HootSuite to schedule updates. I will ask Vadim if he’d like to explain.
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