Facebook announced on January 11th that they are doing some further “tinkering” with their algorithm which has implications for businesses that post organically to their Facebook Business Page. While this has made big news in the last week – it really isn’t anything new, it’s a continuation of changes that started two years ago as we talked about in this blog post.
In short, Facebook gives priority to personal interactions in what it shows to people in their own news feed. Posts made by businesses are considered “third party” posts and are less desirable, they say. The head of its News Feed team, Adam Mosseri, elaborated on what this means for Facebook Business Pages.
“Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses. As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”
He also went on to state quite clearly, “Using “engagement-bait” to goad people into commenting on posts is not a meaningful interaction, and we will continue to demote these posts in News Feed.”
Facebook is an advertising platform and they don’t make money from showing your free business posts. So as Ad Age said in 2015, “Increasingly Facebook is saying that you should assume a day will come when the organic reach (to your page fans in their news feed) is zero.”
Last week Ad Age commented on this newest algorithm change with the equally succinct statement, “Facebook…will de-emphasize the importance of shares and likes. Facebook says it is interested in ‘meaningful interactions’.”
For businesses this latest announcement means that more than ever, if you want to reach people on Facebook (and you should) you need to do paid news feed ads and not rely on posting to your Facebook Business page.
There is a reason that Facebook is expected to take $1 out of every $10 spent on ALL forms of advertising in 2018, and 23% of all digital advertising…Targeted ads (when done correctly) on Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Audience Network, get results for small to medium sized businesses!
