As of last week, it seems that Facebook has taken some more steps in tweeking their News Feed to focus more on businesses and using Facebook as a marketing platform. As of the 14th of this month, users will see fewer “promotional” posts from Facebook Pages starting in January.
In case there was any confusion on the matter, the posts in question aren’t actually Facebook ads, but merely Page posts that seem too much like ads, at least in Facebook’s judgement.
The company said, in a blog post signaling the change,that it is making the move since “hundreds of thousands of people” who were surveyed said “they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.”
According to their survey, Facebook said its survey said people don’t want:
- Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
- Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
- Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
In my opinion, this is good, because as I look through my own Facebook feed, I notice way to many “promoted pages posts”, and I don’t like clicking on them because I suppose I was nervous they were actual ads. So perhaps the reduction of these posts might be a good thing. It would be nice to see posts from people I know and want to follow, instead of seeing posts from those I don’t.
There is a full article on the situation written by Martin Beck on Marketing Land that you can check out if you are interesting in seeing the full amount of news on Facebook’s change on promotional pages. Just follow the link below.
Marketing Land: Facebook News Feed Will Throttle Pages’ “Promotional” Posts