Facebook has just announced changes taking effect in April, 2023

Facebook has just announced that Instant news articles which automatically load on a user’s news feed will be removed after seven years in April 2023, to focus on TikTok-like offerings.

Meta (Facebook's parent company) said the announcement was to give the 37,000 pages that use it time to adjust. After this date, all traffic from links on Facebook will be directed to publishers’ mobile websites.

The company is now giving news publishers six months to readjust their Facebook strategies as they work on its discovery algorithm, which the company is building to take on Chinese short-form video TikTok.

A spokesman for Meta has come out saying that less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in Facebook’s Feed are posts with links to news articles.” “And as we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.”

Bespoke Media chief executive Nic Fren who has been following Facebook's commercial decisions closely over the past few years warns the ongoing changes on the platform is further pushing people off the app and for agents to seriously start considering the future of their social media strategies.

“We faced a similar issue with the platform last year where news links were straight out banned from the app” Mr Fren says. “What we don’t have clarification on is “what’s a news story” this time around.”

“Acknowledging that social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, you want to be ahead of the curve and put plans in place, rather than wait for that day.”

“Not everyone has the time, funds or patience to continually upgrade to new platforms and rebuild an audience from scratch every few years”, he says.

Instead of constantly being at the mercy of the changes on these platforms, the firm has created their own social media channel to combat the changing algorithms, paid promotions, trolls, getting lost in the noise or glitches.

“We control the look and feel of our platform & we have 100% ownership over it”.

Of course we still use social media to drive traffic back to our platform to grow our membership, that hasn’t changed. What we are aiming to do is prepare for that inevitable day when the major social media platforms become obsolete and we have a platform that we own to fall back on.

“Agents have a great advantage at the moment to utilize the channels now & build their own social media channel while these channels are still producing, '' says Mr Fren.

Written by Bespoke Media Group