“Why Does Facebook Hate Me?” or “I Should Have Seen This Coming From A Mile Away.”

Over this past weekend it has come to the attention of the social media community that Facebook has begun testing a new way for posts to go for brand pages. More specifically, this post from Filip Struhárik: Biggest Drop In Organic Facebook Reach We’ve Ever Seen. This test is currently being conducted in 6 different countries across Europe and will possibly be expanded into North America in the following weeks. Here is what we know so far from these tests: The regular Facebook newsfeed is no longer showing posts from pages you follow unless it’s a sponsored post (ad set or boost) as it’s trying to give it a more personal feel by focusing on posts from friends. They are testing multiple new feeds called “Explore Feed” and “Pages Feed”. Explore feed has a few different options depending where you are. Some of it is just an aggregation of posts across Facebook while another version of it has both pages you follow AND posts across Facebook it thinks you would be interested in based off your user behavior. Photo via Matt Navarra Pages feed on the other hand is just a newsfeed made up of all the brand pages you follow so no personal posts from friends. There’s also been talk in the social media community that organic shared posts are not showing up in the regular news feed as well. Facebook has pretty much broken up their feeds and internal apps into three catagories: Engagement Feed, Info Feed, and Utility Feed. This brings a few things into the forefront — Your Facebook ad budget and strategies with your posting behavior. Think of your sponsored posts now as if they were being featured in Facebook messenger. When they started that ad set it made a lot of users upset because messenger was more of a personal space to communicate with friends and family. If the newsfeed changes take place and make the regular news feed into a more personal atmosphere, it needs to be treated that way by not jamming ads for products down the consumer’s throat but actually offering an incentive for clicking on them and more than anything, not being intrusive. While all of this seems like a big change, a few things are true that should have been in your strategy to begin with. An ad budget was already a requirement for the past few years but now you have no choice but to allocate funds if you had not done so already. You need to provide a value that makes you part of the consumers daily lifestyle. They need to feel that if they don’t see you, they’ll look for you. Have an incentive in your sponsored posts that will have a positive impact on viewers seeing it in a newsfeed surrounded by their friends posts. Remember that if it becomes a personal space, you need to make the consumer feel as if you’re helping them out personally. Know your audience’s wants and needs. If you’re advertising a product without the right targeting, you’re going to have users tap to not see more ads like these and then you lose that lead for good. Realistically, this should have been in your Facebook game plan way before now but with these recent changes more than likely coming in the near future, you don’t have a choice.