Facebook have today announced that they will be further restricting updates from Pages, which most businesses use, in favour of bringing people news from their friends and family posts.
Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post that “One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness….”
The focus is going to be on prioritising posts which spark real, genuine conversation. We already heard earlier this week that posts which contain “bait” – such as comment below, tag a friend, give us a like – are going to be restricted, and this statement today further embeds this. Facebook will predict which posts are likely to be the ones people are going to interact on and will place these higher in the newsfeed people see.
Facebook state that Pages may see their reach and referral traffic decrease, and how much this will happen will vary from page to page, depending on the engagement their posts see. People who do still want to prioritise posts from certain Pages can select “See First” in their preferences, so if you have particular favourite pages from which you wouldn’t want to miss an update you can do this, however the reality of this happening seems somewhat unlikely.
As a business this update is disappointing, there is no doubt that this will impact business pages and the success they have experienced previously will now be limited. However, we do love a challenge! We’re currently putting together a package purely aimed at Facebook and these changes, so that you can still make Facebook work for your business in a cost effective way, we just need to be a little bit different and a whole lot smarter and dynamic to get you seen. Challenge accepted! More info on Monday.
