What You Need To Know About Facebook’s Reduction Of Promotional Posts

Facebook has announced that starting in January 2015, they will be reducing promotional page posts from brands in the news feed.

This change will affect all Facebook pages. Surveying hundreds of thousands of users, Facebook found that one of the biggest complaints users have is that they see too many posts from brands that are overly promotional in nature. Here’s an example:

According to those surveyed, the following are traits they do not like seeing:

1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app.
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context.
3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads.

What does this Facebook update mean for your company?

Visibility of posts that are promotional in nature will see a significant fall in reach over time within the news feed. Once you’ve hurt your reach, your brand will see much lower distribution for ALL of your Facebook fan page posts in the future. Regaining that lost reach will take lots of extra effort, so it’s better not to hurt your reach to begin with.

What do you need to do?

Going forward, changes in the type of organic content posted to your Facebook fan page will need to happen in order to avoid being affected by this new Facebook promotional filter. Future social messaging should be crafted to not be promotional in the ways listed above. Separate messaging should be created for organic and paid posts so that the same copy isn’t utilized in both.

By being aware of these changes and how they could affect your organic reach, you’ll be able to ensure your posts reach the largest audience possible while organic visibility is still possible on Facebook.

You can read the announcement and see more examples in the Facebook News Room here.