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Is Facebook's New Home Page Wrecking Your Referrals?

I know it's about as boring as anything to complain about Facebook homepage redesign, but, well, here are: complaining.

This isn't a crank about how it looks different, though. We all know that there are plenty of people that will bust a gasket at any change, but my perspective is on web statistics. And if your experience is anything like mine, Facebook's new design will slice your referrals by about a quarter.

Every Friday, I post my favorite song of the week on my music blog Naive Harmonies, and I used to promote it by feeding the site's RSS into Facebook. I got almost no referrals from Facebook, so a few weeks ago, I stopped the automatic posting, and instead manually posted a link. I could include a short writeup about what exactly I was posting, and I could often include a picture.

The effect was dramatic. I went from one or two Facebook referrals each time to about twelve to fifteen, plus would get between four or five comments and a few likes, none of which I got when I was automatically posting them.

Then Facebook changed their new homepage so that the "News Feed" is the default and only includes people that Facebook thinks you'd be most interested in, which dramatically decreases the number of people who are likely to see your posted link. For the last two weeks, my Friday posted link has gotten a quarter of the clicks they did the previous two weeks.


Those two peaks are the manual posts and two tiny nubbins at the end were the last two posts, which apparently far fewer people saw thanks to the News feed showing much fewer friends.

Facebook can make their design changes all they want, but they're doing far too much algorithmic guessing here as to who wants to see what. From the user side, I feel that they're making things more complex than they need to be. But from a business side, it seems as though getting viewers to your website from Facebook just got a whole lot harder.
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