Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO
Everybody with a website knows that Google owns two of their most important marketing channels: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM). In fact, entire cottage industries have developed around them:
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2007 Google sits atop comScore's June U.S. search rankings at 49.5 percent share, and its grip on the two established marketing channels — organic SEO and paid SEM — has already spawned entire cottage industries of consultants and tools, with the company simultaneously extending that franchise into new surfaces like the AdSense beta for mobile announced days earlier.
Against that backdrop, Inside Facebook's framing of News Feed Optimization (NFO) matters because it names a third channel that lives entirely inside a proprietary feed rather than on the open web: instead of ranking for Google's crawlers, publishers would optimize for Facebook's News Feed algorithm — a gatekeeper no marketer can audit.
First-order effects
- Publishers and marketers gain a second front door to audiences beyond Google, but one where visibility depends on Facebook's relevancy logic rather than crawlable pages, forcing a new optimization discipline (NFO) alongside existing SEO/SEM budgets.
- Google's position as default tollbooth — reinforced by its near-half share of U.S. search — faces its first credible challenger for marketing attention, even as Google pushes outward into mobile search and mobile AdSense.
Second-order effects
- An agency-and-tools ecosystem analogous to the SEO cottage industry forms around feed ranking, shifting some marketing spend away from search keywords toward activity that triggers feed distribution.
- Facebook and Google begin competing directly for the same advertiser relationships, pressuring each to bundle distribution and ads — Google via products like AdSense, Facebook via the feed itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web distribution consolidates around a small set of platforms whose opaque ranking algorithms — not open standards — decide which publishers reach audiences, making organic reach a policy variable controlled by the platform rather than a right of the open web.
The trend: Audience acquisition is shifting from open-web search rankings toward optimization against proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds, with a services industry forming around each new gatekeeper.