Facebook will soon make it even harder to reach your audience

We have recently reported that you can no longer rely on Facebook for marketing your photography business. With the upcoming changes to the News Feed, it appears Facebook is just about to make it even harder.

According to a post from Mark Zuckerberg, one of Facebook’s main goals for 2018 is that the time we spend on this social network is “time well spent.” According to the creator of Facebook, the initial idea was to help people connect with each other. But reportedly, the users have complained that the posts from businesses, brands, and media are “crowding out the personal moments.”

Due to the alleged complaints from the users, Facebook will now focus more on the content from friends and family. They plan to show you less of the public content. And the public content you will see will be the one that “encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

To justify his decision, Zuckerberg cites a recent study about how social media content affects our mood. According to the research, it’s good for our well-being to connect with the people we care about. On the other hand, it may not be as good to just “passively read articles or watch videos.” Zuckerberg notes, however, that live videos tend to generate a lot of interaction. This means they can appear in your News Feed even when they are published on a public page. Or if you manage a page, your live video could appear in your audience’s News Feed.

In Serbia and some other countries, Facebook has placed all content from public pages in the Explore Feed section. If you pay to promote your page, you can appear in the regular News Feed. We wrote about it here and how it can affect your reach. With the new changes, Facebook is pushing the public content even further back.

I assume it’s clear what this means for you as a content creator and/or a business owner. If you want to promote your work or services, the new Facebook’s policy will make it more difficult for you to reach more audience. You will most likely need to pay to promote your content so it appears in the News Feed.

According to some people, this change has already taken place and they get to see far less public content unless some of their friends share it. I still have all the posts from pages in the Explore Feed, so I still only see the sponsored post in my regular News Feed. What about you, have you noticed anything different? And do you plan to pay to promote your page?

[via Engadget]