Bad news for anyone running a business on Facebook — feed ranking has changed, to preference user’s friends over pages they have liked.
Facebook says the platform was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family, and this change reflects that. An increase in promoted posts and ads from businesses trying to reach a decent audience is surely a less benevolent benefit, though.
Imager: tuthelens / Shutterstock.com
Facebook previously made a change to ensure stories posted directly by friends (photos, videos, status updates or links) would be higher up in News Feed — so you are less likely to miss them.
According to Facebook, feedback has highlighted that people are still worried about updates from friends, and for people with many connections this is particularly important, as there are a lot of stories for them to see each day.
“So we are updating News Feed over the coming weeks so that the things posted by the friends you care about are higher up in your News Feed,” Facebook said in a statement.
Overall, Facebook anticipates that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages. The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience.
For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.
“We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends,” Facebook says.