Facebook Looking to Reduce ‘Overly Promotional Posts’

As a business owner you’re undoubtedly using Facebook as one of your main digital marketing mediums, but if you’re not, why not!? After all, it’s a fantastic place to engage with your customers and prospects and get a really personal feel for everything that people expect from you as a brand.

However, an announcement that appeared on the social network’s newsroom blog last Friday may have an impact on the amount of exposure your business page gets going forward.

Now Facebook algorithm updates are nothing new and are something we’ve come to expect. But this recent one looks set to have a greater effect on companies who have previously been using their brand pages for promotional purposes.

As part of their ongoing user experience improvement programme, Facebook are striving to make people’s newsfeeds full of more stuff they want to see and less stuff they don’t want to see. Some of the feedback they’ve apparently received from the Facebook community is that people don’t like posts from pages they’ve liked which come across as ‘overly promotional’.

The devil’s advocate in me though is slightly bemused by this revelation. Surely when a person likes a page, be it a business, celebrity or whatever, they are signing up to receive all future updates from that page, including ones that are promotional in nature.

Reading between the lines, rightly or wrongly, leads me to believe that Facebook may have an ulterior motive behind this change of scope. It figures that if ‘overly promotional’ posts will lose exposure, businesses will need to conduct paid advertising campaigns to continue their reach.

The social network, however, says that as a result of the change there will not be an increase in the amount of ads that people see. This begs the question as to what will fill the gaps that are left by the reduced number of liked page posts.

So what constitutes an ‘overly promotional’ post? Well according to Facebook its posts that coerce people into buying a product or installing an app; posts that push people to enter a competition with no real context; and posts that mimic paid ads on the site.

Posts like this:

Even though the change isn’t due to take effect until January 2015, it’s definitely food for thought for businesses that utilize Facebook to engage with their followers.

So what should you do going forward?

Well one area that still proves to perform well on Facebook is native video. In fact, native videos get some 1 billion views a day! When we say ‘native video’ we’re referring to videos that have been created solely for and published directly to Facebook, and not simply links to stuff on YouTube.

Therefore, if you’re concerned about the impending promotional page decline, but not sure if you want to embark on a paid advertising campaign, why not experiment with native video? Of course, there’s no guarantee that it won’t also be subject to an algorithm change in the future, but at least for now it’s a pretty safe bet.