Facebook news feed change is death to small businesses
Now you have to pay more to reach people who already liked you
Everyone using Facebook pages for their business knew that Facebook’s organic reach for pages was decreasing over the years. And starting from today most of them might have realized that their reach is going go down dramatically in future.
Today it’s very difficult to get traction on Facebook and if want to get the word out there about your brand the only way to do that was to spend some money on Facebook advertising. Even if you spend money on advertising the results are not 100 percent guaranteed.
Today Facebook rolling out changes to their Facebook website and the app that further decrease the organic reach for pages, and will give more priority to pages that decides to spend money on advertising, for most pages this basically means the end.
If you look at the new design of the Facebook app there is an explore feed button (the rocket icon) on the app next to the news feed button. Facebook has split the newsfeed into two, the original news feed that we know will only show content from your friends, while all the updates from the pages have been moved to the explore feed section.
The only posts coming from pages to the old news feed will be the sponsored content from pages paying Facebook to display them on the main newsfeed. Even the items my friends are sharing from Facebook pages are not appearing on my newsfeed today.
Starting from today there will be far less organic reach for pages
This change means far less less organic reach for pages on Facebook. Why? Because people go to Facebook to see what’s their friends are sharing, not to see something a page has posted.
On the desktop version of the Facebook website it is even more difficult for pages to reach users, as they have moved the explore feed to a small icon on the left sidebar, barely noticeable to an average Facebook user.
So this means unless you decide to put more money into Facebook advertising it will be very difficult to get your content out there. It also means more bad news to websites that depend on Facebook for traffic, and pages that use Facebook instant articles.
The bright side to this is the fact that you can see more posts from friends, because previously the newsfeed was filled with content from pages and things people share from pages.
I was even beginning to question why I was using Facebook because I was seeing so real updates from my friends,
So unless someone finds a new marketing strategy to increase their post reach on Facebook it is going to be an uphill battle for the small businesses out there that can’t afford a big advertising budget.
What do you think about this new change from Facebook to their news feed? Do you like it or hate it? I have mixed feelings about it as I use Facebook for business as well as stay connected with friends. Let’s wait and see how things will go.
UPDATE
Facebook has confirmed in a blog post that they are testing this feature only on six selected countries together with some other set of experimental features.
There have been a number of reports about a test we’re running in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. Some have interpreted this test as a future product we plan to deliver globally.
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