Facebook Explore Feed

Is Explore Feed Going To Be The Death Of Facebook Organic Reach?

Would all the money, time and effort spent on growing your Facebook page likes going to be in vain soon?

Well, this is a burning question most of the brands are wondering from the day they noticed the new testing feed on Facebook; Explore Feed.

Launched last month as an isolated test, the feed has already started to make the publishers in Sri Lanka panic. The test currently runs in 6 countries including Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala and Cambodia.

In this post, we plan to have a look at this New Feed of Facebook, its advantages and more to help brands use Facebook marketing with clear answers.

What is Explore feed?

Basically, the Explore Feed presents all the organic brand content from publishers and businesses- which used to be in your news feed, thereby splitting the main feed or the news feed into two different divisions. This leaves the news feed only with posts from family and friends and all the other promoted posts.

You can find the Explore Feed on the left sidebar once you Sign in to Facebook which available in both mobile and desktop versions.

The same new feed has been launched throughout the world apart from the six countries mentioned with one difference; as a complementary feed of popular posts automatically customized for each person’s interest.

Advantages and disadvantages

Since Sri Lanka has already become a Guinea pig in this infant test by Facebook, having a deeper understanding of the explore feed is important in order to survive in Facebook marketing, incase the feed becomes more than just a test. Therefore we have listed advantages and disadvantages of the explore feed below.

Advantages

• Allows users to see posts from their family and friends separately from brand content.
• Ad-free. This gives more room for organic content.
• Enable users with more opportunities to discover relevant brands as the new feed follows an algorithm that presents content based on relevance and user interest even from pages they haven’t followed or liked yet.

Disadvantages

• People may not see posts from the pages they follow.
• Reduces organic reach of all pages a great deal
• This in turn, badly affects the pages with a small marketing budget as paid advertisements seem to be the most efficient way to get your content on the right screens.
• Difficult to access the feed on mobile browsers, which again impact negatively on organic reach of pages.

Will you have to pump more and more money into Facebook as the organic search is about to die? Or will this go the other way around as now you have more free space for brand content?

Although we cannot predict anything on advertising CPI (Cost Per Impression) as no one has a clear idea how the algorithm of this new feed works, we are sure on one thing; Facebook’s goal here is to see the user preference to see content from friends and family in a separate feed from public and brand content.

There’s still a silver lining

Yes. It’s already affected the Sri Lankan brands throwing marketers into panic mode. However the silver lining here is that it hasn’t been permanently implemented. Hear it from the Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed

There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore.