Facebook used to be the focus of social media marketers. Companies spent money to acquire fans for the Facebook Page. Now the dream run is over. From the beginning of 2014 businesses noticed the organic reach of their posts had fallen to single digits.
The criticism started mounting, forcing Facebook to admit on 5 June 2014 that it had tweaked its news feed algorithm to show best posts and remove spam. It pointed out that there is far more content now than can be shown in a users news feed. Naturally competition has grown and only high quality content would be shown.
On 14 November, Facebook announced that "Overly Promotional Page Posts in News Feed" will be reduced starting January 2015. Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time. It specifically defined promotional posts as these :
- Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
- Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
- Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
If you want to promote your business on Facebook, you have to pay. Should businesses give up on their Facebook Page? Not necessarily. Read here for tips on social media marketing on Facebook
