Many Facebook Page owners have seen quite a dramatic drop in the reach of their pages since December 2013. This has fuelled accusations that Facebook has done this in order to force businesses to buy advertising on the world’s largest social media platform. In a recent blog post Facebook’s Brian Boland, who heads up their Ads Product Marketing team, has revealed why this has been happening. Brian says that there are two reasons for the algorithm change that lead to the reduction in the organic reach of Facebook Page posts.
1. There is more content
There is far more content being created and shared on Facebook than there used to be. Brian says that the rise of smartphones has made it easier for social media users to share their experiences with just a few clicks or swipes rather than having to wait until they get back to a desktop device to upload their content. Facebook believes that there is now too much content being uploaded for the average user to be able to cope with. They state in the post that the average user could have up to 1500 new updates every time they sign into Facebook. This increase in content volume is leading to increased pressure on users Newsfeeds and this makes it more difficult for quality content to gain traction.
2. Changes to How Newsfeed Works
This pressure on the Newsfeed has led to Facebook introducing changes to the way the Newsfeed algorithm works. Facebook would point in particular to the changes that they have made to try to remove Newsfeed spam and attempts to provide the most compelling content to their users as prime examples of this.
Brian goes on to say that the changes are not aimed at generating more business for Facebook. One interesting parallel that Brian draws in his post is between what Facebook is doing at the moment and the way that search engines changed over time. As search engines became more sophisticated some sites rose to the top of the rankings while others saw their rankings reduced. This in turn led to some sites gaining more traffic while others lost traffic.
I think that large portions of what Facebook is claiming are accurate, there are more people sharing more content every day and eventually there is a saturation point. Anybody who has a Twitter account with which they follow a large number of users will know that their Twitter stream is very cluttered and you do not read anywhere near every Tweet that is in your Twitter stream.
The claim that they have not made any of these changes to encourage page owners to buy advertising may not be quite so true. Facebook has for many years been supported by investors and it was they who paid into Facebook so that users, both personal and business, did not have to. Now that Facebook is a public company they have to generate income and it makes more sense to collect that income from businesses that want to access the data that Facebook holds. I do not think that there is anything wrong with Facebook wanting businesses to pay for advertising. I don’t think that there is a TV channel that allows free advertising so why should social media really be any different?