Our analysis of Facebook data, sourced from NewsWhip, hints that the latest News Feed tweak may mean more native videos, fewer links from publishers’ Pages. Facebook execs already believe that people’s news feeds “will be probably all video” in five years. Maybe a lot sooner when it comes to the publisher portion of people’s feeds after Facebook’s latest algorithm change rolls out. Late last month, Facebook announced a tweak to the uber-arbiter news feed algorithm that will make Pages’ organic reach more dependent on people sharing their Page posts. “We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends,” Facebook engineering director Lars Backstrom wrote in a company blog post advising Page owners that their organic reach and referral traffic may drop as a result of the change. So what are those “things” for Pages to post that people on Facebook are most likely to share? If you’re a publisher, they appear to be videos people can watch without leaving Facebook way more often than they are links to a publisher’s site, based on Facebook data collected through social news analytics tool NewsWhip. I used NewsWhip’s analytics tool to pull data for the 15 most popular publishers on Facebook, according to NewsWhip’s April 2016 list (the most recently available list). I’ll get in the weeds on the exact data I pulled at the bottom of this post, but for the sake of not alienating those uninterested in an itemized list, I looked at the 300 most-shared videos, the 300 most-shared photos, the 300 most-shared text posts and the 300 most-shared links across those publishers’ Facebook Pages — including some Pages connected to those publishers; I’ll explain that later — as well as the 300 most-shared links to their sites posted to Facebook by normal people. Before we get into the stats, let’s parse what Backstrom said in the aforementioned blog post about how Facebook’s tweaked algorithm will look at Page posts. “[I]f a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts,”...
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Edging closer to Periscope, social network gives a small number of US iPhone users ability to live stream. Still no access for business Pages. Facebook is dropping the velvet rope on live video streaming. Today, the social network announcedthat it is giving a select group of US iPhone users the ability to broadcast live from within the Facebook platform. At launch in August, Facebook’s live streaming feature was available only to celebrities and other public figures with access to Mentions, an iOS app designed to help high-profile people to manage their Facebook presence. In September, Facebook opened Mentions to all verified users, and now it’s starting the process of giving everyone access, beginning with five percent of US iPhone users. They will have the option to select a “live video” icon when they start posting a status update. After writing a description and sharing with their preferred audience, they can launch the live stream. During the broadcast, they are able to see the number of live viewers, names of friends tuning in and a stream of comments in real-time. After the broadcast ends, videos are saved on users’ Timelines. No Video Streaming For Business Pages Still left out, however, are Facebook Pages. For now, businesses that want to engage consumers with live video will have to stick to Periscope, Meerkat, Blab, UStream or the like. That’s likely to change in the future, given Facebook’s heavy emphasis on video of all types. Facebook video gets more than eight billion views a day, and the company has shown no hesitancy to eventually roll out video features to all users, including businesses. But for now, most marketers will have to wait. How long? We asked Facebook about plans to give live video access to business Pages and will update this post when we get a response. Starting with celebrities for live streaming has allowed Facebook to make sure its technical infrastructure was robust enough to handle large traffic spikes like the one million viewers it took on during a Vin Diesel live stream last month. You can read more about the technical challenges onFacebook’s engineering blog. Also included in today’s update is a new consumer-facing collage feature for sharing photos and video....
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