Facebook Reducing Visibility of Auto-Posts in News Feed

Facebook has made a significant change to their platform that will alter the way that marketers and apps, as well as consumers, share and view information: The social network will remove some of the automation around publishing.

Their research has found that “people engage more with stories that are shared explicitly rather than implicitly, and often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared implicitly or automatically.” They have already removed automatic sharing from Instagram so that users will need to deliberately hit the “share to Facebook” icon from the sharing screen.

Moving forward, Facebook plans to prioritize the stories that are shared explicitly higher than those that are shared implicitly. Below are some of the options that Facebook recommends for sharing posts explicitly.

Using Apps for Explicit Sharing

If you use an app to share an Open Graph story, you can request to mark your post as explicit. Depending on which app you use, there will typically be the option to click a button indicating you would like the post to go live on Facebook.

Share with Facebook Messenger

Users will now have access to Message Dialog, which will allow them to quickly share an article, video, or other content type directly into a thread on Messenger.

According to Facebook, more than 200 million people use Messenger every month. It is recommended that apps begin adding this option to increase content visibility.

Send to Mobile Option

Facebook’s Send to Mobile will allow a user that has logged into Facebook on their desktop to send a notification to their mobile device to download the application. If you’ve already upgraded to the new Facebook Login, there will be automatic integration so you won’t have to take the extra step to download on your mobile device. Learn more about Send to Mobile.

Mobile Like Button

Facebook plans to bring Like buttons to mobile apps. Currently, Like and Share buttons are viewed on nearly 10 million websites per day and with this option, users can share content from their app with one click. The beta version of this solution is now available for iOS.

What Do You Think?

Facebook has also shared that in the near future, automatically posted updates will show up less and less in consumers’ news feeds. How does this recent change affect your digital marketing strategy?