Facebook Tweak Means Less Traffic For Brand Pages

This month, Facebook changed the algorithm (again) for stories that appear on the News Feed. Now, you’re more likely to see posts that link to high quality, popular news articles.

Facebook explained on a December 2 blog post that “Our surveys show that on average people prefer links to high quality articles about current events, their favorite sports team or shared interests, to the latest meme. Starting soon, we’ll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook when people click on those stories on mobile.”

While this change was originally thought to have disastrous consequences for sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, it will actually be worse for social media marketers, reports Business Insider. Social media marketing agency Ignite analyzed 689 posts from 21 brand pages, and found a 44 percent decline in people who saw posts from those brands.

Now, in order for a brand to get more exposure on Facebook, they’ll have to pay more.

Considering this change, we think people will continue to move away from Facebook, as has been a slow trend up until this point. While we believe a diversified social media strategy is the best one and will continue to market on Facebook, our major focus will be diverted to other networks, like Google+.