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In late October, , unveiling 2 different views for users to discover content. The default view is called the News Feed, in which Facebook goes all on you and displays stories and updates from friends that it thinks you’ll like, of course based off of past site activity. The other view is called the Live Feed, which is essentially the Mini/News Feed you’ve grown accustomed to, but with some clear .

While I think it’s great that Facebook has created yet another way for users to get lost on the site while re-living their glory days, the new setup could seriously decrease the amount of easy (free) traffic to a brand’s Facebook page.

Let me explain:

  • As brands get better about leveraging their Facebook Fan Pages as CRM tools, they incessantly check to see how many fans they have
  • Since Social Media budgets are often hard to come by, new fan acquisition usually relies solely on organic growth
  • Organic growth on Facebook is mainly driven by fans interacting with a brand, which results in their friends being informed of that interaction
  • Brands typically spur fan interaction by posting status updates to solicit engagement(comment, like, view, share)
  • Fans would see these status updates in their News Feed in between updates from friends

But now:

  • The current News Feed is the default view, and it’s likely that the majority of brand updates will be filtered out and only appear on the Live Feed (this assumes a person rarely visits the brand pages they fan)
  • Split View + Secondary Placement = Fewer eyeballs to brand messaging (status update no longer easy way to drive pageviews)

Is this just another strategic move by Facebook to make it harder on brands to leverage the platform without paying them? When “Facebook Application” became the new buzz term in digital media, developers got rich while Facebook got an increase in time spent per visit.  To counter, Facebook nearly made applications obsolete by shifting their profile location to a tertiary tab no one clicks on.

So how can brands grow their Facebook fan bases in 2010?  I’ll detail that in my next post – Top 5 Ways To Grow A Facebook Fan Base.

 

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