Recently, Facebook made some changes that favored “high quality articles” and lowered the visibility of posts like “the latest meme” on people’s feeds. The result? Plenty of advertising centric agencies worried about having to now pay more to promote their content on Facebook (see Facebook’s blog post). But as an agency executive whose roots are in public relations, I see this change as a huge validation of our approach.
’The public relations profession’s roots are not just in creating stories, but creating stories people want to share and discuss. Social agencies that are more advertising centric tend to focus much more on marketing oriented shareable content with creating a memes being a win. A meme is a great indicator of interest in the content but it’s not a conversation. In other words, the PR profession sees the share, or creating sharable high quality content (images, brand journalist articles, earned media articles), simply as means to an end. The sharing is not the end, or the conversation.
Facebook seems to be following the strategy of Google search and traditional news media businesses which focus on quality editorial content that drives true conversation while putting marketing content in the paid section.
As always, your comments, criticisms, suggestions and other insights or angles I may not have considered are very welcome.
Source: Facebook
