Facebook’s original news feed was designed to show users interesting stories and updates from their friends. However, over time, as businesses and organizations have increasingly turned to Facebook for its marketing potential, the feed has become flooded with promotional content. According to Facebook, this has led to users seeing more promotional posts and fewer updates from their friends and family. As a result, Facebook has announced a significant update to address this.
In the near future (though the exact timeline hasn’t been released), posts from Pages will be shown less frequently in the news feed. This change means that running marketing campaigns through Facebook Pages will become more challenging, as the organic reach of posts will continue to decline. In the past, similar changes have led to a 40% drop in audience reach, and this trend is expected to worsen. This could also be seen as a strategy to push advertisers toward Facebook’s paid advertising platform, which may become more appealing as the organic reach decreases.
For personal users, the impact may be less noticeable—while promotional posts can be annoying, users can simply unfollow Pages that post too much unwanted content. Paid and boosted posts, however, remain unavoidable and often the most disruptive.
For Page owners, this is more bad news. Their organic reach will be further diminished, which means they’ll likely need to invest more in paid advertising to maintain the same audience reach. While there could be some hidden benefits, such as potentially higher engagement due to less promotional content in the feed, the update seems to make life harder for social media marketers.