Facebook to Focus Feed on Friends, Hurting Your Business Page’s Reach

Facebook has announced that it will be introducing drastic changes to how its News Feed works, prioritizing content from family and friends and de-emphasizing content from publishers and brands. If you use business page for your photography services, you may soon see your reach plummet.

“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us,” writes Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness.

“But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. […] Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. […] you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups. […] you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.”

Zuckerberg says the goal of Facebook is now changing from helping you find relevant content to helping you find “meaningful social interactions.”

More specifically, Facebook says that instead of determining the ranking of posts based on reactions, comments, and shares, the company will prioritize posts that “spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.”

Facebook warns that pages will see less reach and referral traffic:

Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.

As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.

This latest announcement is bad news for business owners who have spent a great deal of time and money building up the followers and reach of Facebook business pages. If you’d like to survive in the new News Feed, make sure the photos and content you post somehow lead to “meaningful interactions” between people.