With 1 Billion active monthly users, there’s simply no reason for businesses not to be on Facebook. The opportunity to engage with, and drive traffic from, potential customers makes the social network one of the biggest and best mediums for brand-to-consumer communication. Facebook loves the added engagement brands (and pages) bring, but rightfully wants to protect the user experience from spam, low quality content, and now, overly promotional content. Remember, Facebook is a publically traded company now and that means stakeholders to answer to.
Facebook surveyed hundreds of thousands of users and found that the vast majority wanted to see more from their friends and families and less from brands. After digesting that data, Facebook released a November 2014 News Feed update.
“Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this (pictured above) type of content in their News Feeds. As we’ve said before, News Feed is already a competitive place — as more people and Pages are posting content, competition to appear in News Feed has increased. All of this means that Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.
Another set of Facebook changes… are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. In the past few months, we’ve seen Facebook take steps to downgrade posts using memes and click-bait. And you can be sure that more changes will come – it’s part of the Facebook Game.
Before marketers start freaking out, note that this only applies to organic content, not ads. If you thought your organic reach was suffering before, this will likely drop that number further.
Facebook defines the following as being promotional:
1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product of install an app
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real content
3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads.
Remember, this should not affect your Facebook Ads Strategy – all three examples above would make perfect ads.
How will Facebook police these changes? Tracking click-bait or low quality links is easy: the user clicks from Facebook and returns (bounces) quickly. Facebook sees and tracks this as a sign of a low quality link. The lines are less clear for promotional content, especially in a time where many brands’ Facebook strategy is to send as much traffic to their own site as possible.
Before you abandon building a fan page completely, there is a little known benefit of having an existing fan base. When you do go out to reach these fans via Facebook Ads, the cost is almost always cheaper when targeting fans of your existing page as opposed to non-fans. Perhaps this is Facebook’s way of rewarding big pages after taking away all of that juicy organic reach.
Look for these news feed updates to take effect in January 2015.