Facebook Vs. Memes?

Marie Formica

Category: Strategy

12.04.2013

Facebook recently announced that it is changing the way its News Feed serves up stories to visitors. Facebook makes clear in their release that it will not prioritize memes – image macros using a text overlay – when they wrote, “meme photos may show up a bit less prominently.”

“Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme.” -Facebook

What does this mean for managing your online presence?

If your brand has been using image macros, or memes, these are still acceptable content to post, and may result in high engagement from certain users. However, you need to optimize for the new functionality of the News Feed to address these changes by the social network.

Facebook will prioritize content that it calls “high quality,” and will repeatedly bump stories that have new comments from friends up in the News Feed. They define this high quality content as timely and relevant, from a trusted source, shareable, genuinely interesting, and not annoying. In this week’s announcement they cited an article from The Atlantic as an example of a high quality source. Additionally, Facebook suggests featuring “great images” to accompany post text, which will get especially good traction on mobile.

Continue posting relevant, interesting content that visitors will find helpful or intriguing enough to share with friends. And, be sure to include an arresting image in your post to gather attention – but maybe find an image that isn’t a meme.

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