If you own a business and use Facebook to market your brand online, you may have noticed your organic reach dwindling over the past few months. Even pages with larger followings, upwards of tens of thousands of fans, have noticed a significant drop in impressions and are only seeing a fraction of the engagement they were only a few months ago.
For quite some time now, digital marketers have accused Facebook of pushing businesses to use paid promotions to increase the reach of their posts. And recently Facebook released a document confirming these accusations.
The three-page document titled “Generating business results on Facebook” outlines the social platform’s recent algorithm shift and explains what type of impact publishers can expect from these recent changes and offers some tips on how marketers can maximize their overall reach.
“We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”
This “organic distribution” that Facebook mentions above refers to the total number of people that will see your non-promoted or “non-paid” posts in their newsfeed. In an effort to sift through and streamline the massive content flow, Facebook is trying to weed out spammy, unengaging, promotional content – that is unless you want to pay for it.
With over one billion unique users, Facebook is a pretty solid marketing platform, especially if you have a strong social following. Being that Facebook is now a public company, they need to appease investors. And what better way to keep investors happy, then by generating more ad revenue?
Additionally, Facebook also mentioned last week that news stories will be given more prominence in users newsfeeds.
