Facebook Reduces the Visibility of Your Fan Page Posts

 On Thursday 20th September, Facebook announced it would be changing the algorithm that decided what a users sees on their newsfeed, this is know as the Edgerank Formula.  Now this wouldn’t usually spark any worries, but their focus is on organic brand page posts with an aim the reduce clutter served up to mobile and tablet users by brands.

Click here for tip on how to increase the visibility of your posts in the newsfeed.

We’re also in the middle of Facebook’s struggle to bump up it’s share price, one of it’s strategies is trying to maximize the amount of paid advertising it has on it’s platform.

Although changes to their algorithm happen regularly, we’ve never seen an effort to actually reduce the visibility of brand posts to those who have liked that page.  While Facebook says this isn’t to penalize brand pages, and that engagement shouldn’t be affected, it does make me wonder if they will be increasing the visibility of Sponsored Stories in the news feed for users on mobile devices.

Let me throw some pointers at you that can help protect your page from these changes:

• Your reach for organic page posts will decrease.  This could be anywhere from 5% to 40%.  Some may remain unaffected, so please check your insights.
•  Facebook may increase organic/paid post ratio in which 80% of content in the newsfeed is organic and 20% is paid in the form of Sponsored Stories.
•  You need to develop your content strategy with newsfeed interaction in mind.
•  Post at the optimal time.  This is usually after 8pm when users have more time to interact.
•  To go beyond your organic reach limitations, utilise the sponsored story feature to widen your audience.

 Please let me know if you reach has dropped on your Fan Page in the comments below.

Thanks to Social@Ogilvy for introducing me to this article.