Facebook’s Drastic News Feed Change: What It Means for Your Business

Facebook has started to prioritize posts from family and friends over posts from businesses, and the change will drastically impact your business’s page.

The new goal for the News Feed, as outlined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is to switch from presenting relevant content in the News Feed to presenting content that sparks meaningful social interactions among your family and friends. He then goes on to explain what this looks like in practice (emphasis ours): “As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content, like posts from businesses, brands and media.”

“Less” may not encapsulate the severity of this change to businesses on Facebook. While no one can accurately predict the exact effect, expect posts from your pool/spa business page to see a significant decrease in organic reach, according to Hootsuite, a digital marketing leader. And at least one analyst believes organic reach for businesses could drop to zero.

What can you do to continue reaching your customers of Facebook? According to Hootsuite:

1) Create meaningful interactions. Zuckerberg said in his post that pages making posts people don’t usually react to—with likes, comments, shares—will see the biggest decrease in reach. That means businesses will need to step up their content game and create posts that encourage engagement: add questions or riff on something timely that users will have an opinion on. Users will see posts friends and family are engaging with.

2) But don’t bait engagement. The spammy content posts you see begging for likes, comments or shares will be demoted. The engagement fostered should be natural.

3) The “See First” option. Encourage your followers to go to your page and click the “See First” button, which is located underneath “Following” on your page. (You can’t see the button as the owner of your page, so test it out by going to another page you follow.) Followers who choose “See First” will see your posts in their News Feed despite the change. This is what it looks like:

4) Pay money. The least favorite option is to “boost” a post to increase views. Fortunately, boosting a post can be done inexpensively — fewer than $10 — and still achieve success, although analysts expect the News Feed change will force businesses to pay more for the same amount of reach as before.

Above all, make sure you closely watch how your Facebook posts perform over the next few months by using the “Insights” tab on your page. Experiment with different post types and see what works and what doesn’t.