Facebook's New Explore Feed, or Remember the Rules of Facebook: Facebook Makes the Rules

Back in the old days of media relations, those of us who worked in communications for non-profits understood the rules of the media game.

In short, it was this: The media owned the newspapers, TV and radio stations, and they made the rules for who got coverage.

These rules varied from outlet to outlet, but in the main the rules for getting coverage involved being timely, topical, local, interesting, and always trying to provide human interest—a person with a story to tell.

It was our job, as communicators, to abide by these rules, and to use them to get the coverage we wanted.

Sure, it went both ways—the media needed us, the non-profits, as much as we needed them. They couldn’t know everything that was going on in the community, so they counted on us to help them find good stories about interesting people and programs to report.

Today, with the traditional media dying, the game has changed. Now if we want to reach supporters and others, we have social media—we can bypass things like newspapers, radio and TV and their old rules.

Now we can publish anything we want, anytime we want—no need to worry about things like editorial judgement, space, time, or the various angles that once determined whether our press releases got used or not.

Social media may have changed the way the game is played, but one thing hasn't changed: We don’t own Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg does, and he makes the rules. 

This comes as a surprise to some—Facebook feels like ours. It’s our page, our group, our feed. We can do anything we want!

Maybe not, as we were reminded last year when Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm to feature more information from friends and less from publishers and organizations.

As Facebook stated in its News Feed values: “Friends and family come first.” Organizations, like ours, came second, or lower.

We were reminded of this again in October, when Facebook did a full roll-out of its Explore Feed.

The Explore Feed is a place where you will find links such as pages, groups, events, photos and more. It appears on the left hand side of the page. (As in the image at the top of this post.)

It's a place where Facebook is putting pages—posts from the media, and some organizations and non-profits (if the pages of my Explore Feed is anything to go on).

The roll-out became big news in the tech and media world this month when Facebook did a test in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.

In those countries, all content from media publishers was bumped to the Explore Feed, without warning, instead of appearing in the regular News Feed of people who liked their pages

The result? Since almost nobody pays attention to the Explore Feed, interactions with posts from those publishers fell by two-thirds.

This caused panic in those countries, and also in other places.

Was Facebook about to move all organizational and brand content to another feed? Was this an effort to force groups to pay if they wanted to appear in the regular News Feeds of users?

Facebook responded that it was just a test, and it has no plans to roll it out further. And maybe that's the case. Or maybe not. After all, they make the rules, and the rules could change.

Now, to be fair, Facebook is in a battle to keep our News Feeds relevant and safe from fake news and assorted promotional and advertising content we don’t want to see.

There are plenty of organizations, businesses and groups (hello, Russia!) trying to game the system to get in front of our eyeballs.

If Facebook isn’t careful, our feeds will be dominated by junk. If that happens, we will stop using it. And Facebook doesn't want that to happen. Their business model depends on attracting more people to their platform.

So: Where will this end up? I have no idea. I don’t believe Facebook wants to alienate businesses and non-profit groups by forcing them into places nobody bothers to go. Like the mainstream media of old, it needs us to provide good, relevant content that people want to see.

But at the end of the day, Facebook will do what’s best for Facebook—not for groups like ours.

So as we create social media strategies, hire social media staff, and build budgets around Facebook (and other social media channels), we always need to remember the main rule: We don’t own these channels.

And we don’t make the rules.