I lately happened across articles on Tech Crunch that appeared to become protecting Facebook for it’s relatively recent practice of allowing companies to pay for to obtain their Facebook posts “promoted” even though many other medication is complaining their non-compensated posts are turning up on their own fans’ pages significantly less frequently than ever before. (See “Killing Rumors With Details: No, Facebook Did not Decrease Page Feed Achieve Money Promoted Posts” by TechCrunch on 11/7/12.) And even though they make an effort to defend Facebook from the wrongdoing within this situation, In my opinion there’s an even bigger story that small companies who’re using Facebook as a way of promoting their business have to hear.
The Debate…
Several recent posts and articles by various organizations happen to be complaining that since Facebook launched its new “Promoted Posts” program – which enables an individual or business to pay for to obtain their posts placed greater and longer on its fans’ pages – their non-promoted (non-compensated) posts are turning up on less of the fans’ pages.
They’re claiming that Facebook is intentionally lowering the amount of pages which their posts appear so that they can get these companies to begin having to pay to obtain their posts promoted. Quite simply, they claim that it is money grab by Facebook to improve revenues by selling more Promoted Posts.
The Backdrop…
Facebook’s “Promoted Posts” program really started in May of the year however they did not really start moving it and promoting it (should you pardon the pun!) until September. And merely by pure coincidence (as Facebook informs it, anyway), Facebook also made some significant changes to the publish ranking algorithms in September affecting which posts get displayed inside a person’s timeline.
Will Cathcart, Facebook’s product manager for news feed told Tech Crunch the next concerning these changes for their publish ranking formula changes.
We designed a relatively large ranking alternation in September that is built to reduce junk e-mail complaints from users. We used [junk e-mail] reports in an aggregate level to locate Pages or apps generating lots of reports [and reduce their achieve]. We have also added personalized tries to reduce existence of posts you are prone to complain about.”
The report procedes to state that essentially, if you do not “like”, discuss, or share posts from the certain person or business in your timeline, that Facebook interprets that to mean that you would like to determine a smaller amount of individuals kinds of posts, and for that reason they reveal individuals posts inside your timeline less often.
To be fair, this isn’t entirely unlike Google’s recent search formula changes that display search engine results they determine you’d be most thinking about according to your recent on the internet and search activity.
