The
Google-Facebook merry-go-round
In fact, Google and Facebook’s continual
back-and-forth is the status quo. They have been chasing each other around in
circles for years now, each taking it in turns to try their hand at the other’s
specialist area.
Google
experimented with social networking; Facebook became the go-to place to find content.
Both launched lightning-fast takes on the mobile web – Accelerated Mobile Pages
and Instant Articles – in 2015 with a global roll-out in 2016. Now, Facebook is
returning to its “roots” of showing you what your family and friends are up to,
while the latest updates to Google’s smart assistant indicate that Google is
moving back into surfacing content.
In other words, this is just the most
recent step in a dance that has been going on for more than 10 years. Facebook
might have ceded some ground to Google in the realm of referral traffic to
publishers, partly in a bid to rid itself of the fake news scandal that has
dogged it since mid to late 2016.
However, the two continue to vie for
dominance in countless other areas, such as artificial intelligence, smart home
hubs, digital assistants, and advertising. Facebook continues to drive its
investment in online video, encroaching on Google-owned YouTube’s territory,
while Google recently announced a new foray into social publishing with Google
Stamp.
At the height of the fake news
controversy, Google and Facebook’s names frequently appeared side-by-side, with
both companies accused of peddling false information to their users and
perpetrating the “filter bubble” that allows fake news to thrive.
As a result, some have speculated that
Google might now follow in Facebook’s footsteps and take steps to distance
itself from publishers.
However, Google is already taking action
– or at least appearing to take action – against fake news on its search engine
by implementing ‘fact-checking’ labels, partnering with the International
Fact-Checking Network to combat misinformation, and purging questionable
overseas websites that mask their country of origin from Google News.
Unless there is another significant wave
of backlash over fake news to force Google’s hand, it seems likely that Google
will take the “win” over Facebook and avoid jeopardizing its relationship with
publishers – particularly given its recent moves to become more
publisher-friendly by supporting paywalled content.
Meanwhile,
publishers need to work out how to reconfigure their online strategy with
Facebook much less in the picture. Will we be seeing a newfound reliance on SEO
and search marketing?
Publishers:
time to learn from SEO
Publishers are about to find themselves
in the very same position that brand marketers found themselves at the end of
2014, when Facebook announced that it was killing off organic reach for brand
Pages. Just like publisher referral traffic now, brand Page reach had been in
steady decline for some time, and the Facebook announcement only confirmed what
many already suspected was coming.
At the time, brands were forced to
abandon a marketing model that relied on free promotion from Facebook pages
with hundreds of thousands of Likes, and instead pay for advertising or go
elsewhere for their traffic. Sound familiar?
The situation with publishers is
therefore nothing new, but is still a huge blow for media organizations who
have developed a “social-first” strategy over the years and rely on Facebook as
a primary source of traffic.
Following the news that Google had
overtaken Facebook as a source of referral traffic, Adam Tinworth blogged:
“Business models dependent on Facebook growth are dead in the water, unless you
can afford to buy that growth.
“Publishers will need a renewed focus on
SEO — especially those that have been social-first.”
Writing for The Drum, founder and
managing director of 93digital, Alex Price, observed that Facebook was
following Google in “placing its long-term bet on quality [content]”, singling
out Facebook-driven publications like 9GAG, Unilad and The Lad Bible as most
likely to suffer from the change.
“If I were them, I would be thinking
hard about the teams of people I employ to churn out social media content and
how sustainable that now is.”
He added that publishers would need to
focus on retention and repeat visits to drive long-term value, and optimize the
experience of their website, particularly on mobile, in order to build a sustainable
source of revenue in the post-Facebook age.
Publish quality content, increase
engagement, optimize for mobile… if you’re in SEO, this list will be starting
to sound very familiar. It’s a mantra that the search industry has been
repeating for years.
High-quality publishers are likely doing
most of these things already, so their task will be to ramp up those efforts
while diversifying their sources of traffic beyond Facebook. This will stand
them in good stead on the search engine results page and beyond.
For
lower-quality social publishers, things might not be so easy. After all, these
publications evolved specifically to cater to a social sharing environment,
which will soon no longer exist.