Facebook Algorithm Change = Death of Memes?

A few days ago, Facebook made some additional changes to its algorithm. Here are the changes summarized below:

• Posts to popular articles and other content will show up more than images.
• Text posts reach a larger audience than image posts do.

We’ve seen the changes affecting the reach of our posts over the last few days:

Our average reach was ~50, but over the last 3 days, the highest reach for one of our posts was only 22.

What does this mean? Well first, forget trying to get engagement through memes. Facebook is becoming inundated with meme images and it’s clear the social network is looking to shift towards a place to get high-quality content rather than a meme farm.

Second, this change coupled with the recent “story bump” update means content aggregators will be rewarded for posting highly engaging content. This means you’ll probably see a lot more articles from large publications like the New York Times and high-traffic blogs like Mashable.

It seems that, in an effort to compete with other quickly growing social networks like reddit and to get users to stay on the platform, Facebook is trying to become a network that people go to for high-quality news and content. Also, in an effort to become a valuable company in the eyes of shareholders, they are pushing smaller content creators to pay for sponsored posts and ads, since less trafficked blogs don’t tend to get as much engagement as larger publications.

If Facebook is a channel that you use in your marketing plan, consider these changes and test the effect your metrics.  Will the greater reach of text posts help your click-through rate, or will the lack of an image cause people to skim over your post even though it reaches more people?