Facebook Trial Dropping Non Promoted Posts from News Feed

Life could be about to get a lot harder for small businesses marketing on Facebook as the social media giant trials removing all non-promoted business content from users’ news feeds.

Things were already pretty bad with an estimated reach of around 6% of your total subscribers for any post, so this move isn’t entirely unexpected: it’s just the final play in the shift to getting businesses to pay for any visibility at all in the news feed.

A few years ago, if anyone liked your business page, then your posts would show up in their feed. As they should if someone’s made the decision to ‘like’ the page. That’s them saying that they want to get updates from your business, too, amidst the reams of selfies and cat memes; maybe break things up a bit – and inform them of an offer or two they’d like to know about.

Then Facebook updated its news feed algorithm under the guise of giving users a better experience, by unilaterally deciding for users what they get to see, and automatically filtering the results.

The rationale being (beyond Facebook thinking it knows you better than you know yourself) that Facebook is all about your friends and being social…which it is.

But Facebook says to hell with all that and chucks it out the window if you pay to boost a post on your business page.

And Facebook is always encouraging you to do that, telling you how many thousands of people you could reach, all for a few dollars spend – then you can get into the news feed and be just as loud and brash and totally irrelevant and intrusive as you want.

If you’ve got the money.

Because it’s always all about the money with Facebook.

So, I can’t say reading this particular piece of news surprised me.

At the moment this is just being trialled in six countries including Slovakia, Serbia and Sri Lanka, and Facebook is saying they currently have no plans to roll this out globally.

I think  we take that with a pinch of salt. This has already been all but de facto implemented, for all the organic reach you can expect.

For the last several years the push has been on paid advertising to get into the news feed of the people who’ve expressed the wish to get your updates, never mind advertise to anyone who hasn’t.

This will make Facebook a purely paid advertising service for small business. You can still set your page up for free, but posting without paid boosts or an advertising campaign, means you’re speaking to yourself.

In that scenario, what’s the point of a ‘like’ awareness campaign, if after paying for the campaign, you have to pay again for these people to see your content.

Okay, as I say, that’s pretty much where we’ve been at the last couple of years, but there was at least the expectation that some of your followers would see your posts. Now even that’s going to go.

It kinda makes me wonder if some small businesses won’t just give up on Facebook altogether. What’s the point if you’re just speaking to yourself? Social media takes time, so why bother if it’s just a waste of time.

It used to be, too, that you could upload video to Facebook and it wouldn’t get ads spliced into like Youtube. It was slightly more forgivable for Youtube as the video was their feed, the comments below secondary, but for Facebook, the video was nestled in the news feed of a myriad of different posts already, so they didn’t need to splice ads into their videos.

But they’re gonna do that, too. I read earlier this year that for vids over thirty seconds I think it is, they’re going to get ads shoehorned into them.

I’d hope they wouldn’t do that if you’re paying to promote your own video in the newsfeed, but who knows?

Anyway, this is just a quick heads-up. You can read the full article here.