Facebook has continued to squeeze out any free ad opportunities on its social network, with a new privacy policy that reduces the reach of brand’s promotional messages from their fan pages… unless they pay for them.
Under the new scheme, set to come into place in January 2015,Facebook would change the rankings of some posts made by marketers, such as pitches to install a new mobile app or tune into a TV show, to reduce the number that appear in the news feeds of its 1.35 billion global users.
In a blog post, the company told marketers that if they wanted to reach customers on Facebook, they needed to buy an ad.
The move will mean that fewer fans of a retailer will see its notice about a big sale and fewer fans of a video game company will see a post promoting its latest app.
Even posts from big advertisers that spend millions of dollars on Facebook ads will vanish from the news feeds of their fans unless they turn them into ads.
An example of a Facebook post that users told the social network felt too promotional is shown below:
The social network said the change came after it asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their news feeds, and many responded that they want to see less promotional content.
So many posts, videos and images are being published on Facebook that the average user has about 1,500 new items they could see when they log on. Some people have as many as 15,000, the company says.
Revealing the move in a blog post, Facebook said: “Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their news feeds. As we’ve said before, news feed is already a competitive place – as more people and pages are posting content, competition to appear in news feed has increased. All of this means that pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.”
Read the official blog post here