Facebook as you may have heard has
announced that they will start giving posts by people you know, priority
over posts from The “official” pages of the many media outlets out
there. This has resulted in quite a few “ Chicken Little” type comments
around the net. Its easy to see why. Over 40% of web traffic referrals
come from Facebook. This gains even more importance when you understand
that a large and growing segment of society gets their news online.
However there are at least two big reasons that this development is not
the media Armageddon you might think.
- Change is part of life on the net- Early
adopters will remember Compuserve. It was THE way most people got on
the net coming out of the days of bulletin board gateways. Then AOL was
king of the heap. Practically everybody on the web was on AOL. Now
almost every house on the average block probably has a different
provider. Even in the early days of SEO everything was about links,
links, links. There was time brief time when it didn't seem like there
could be such a thing as a bad link. Even now, the right links can be
very important ! Then it was all about search engines. First came Yahoo,
and more recently Google. Even with almost half of web traffic
referrals coming from Facebook, search engines are still very much in
play. The point is if you are going to make it in the world of the web,
you are going to have to learn to change as the web changes. The
majority of media sites out there already understand this. I have no
doubt that they will stronger, not weaker coming out of this change.
Facebook's New Algorithm: Why the Media's Sky is not Falling.