Bad news about Jan/15 Facebook business update

Hey guys,
Facebook announced that there will be an update for people who are using Facebook for business. These updates will look great for the ordinary users as they will see "less links / more friends and pages stories". And here is a summary for the effects of this update on Pages.
1. Starting for 1st of Jan/15, there will be a noticeable decrease of the links reach on Facebook pages "especially those including Adsense / CPA business"
2. Reach and users engagement of the other and ordinary posts will increase.
3. Facebook looks for business companies as companies that have a big audience online and the use of Facebook in this case can be considered just another way for more reach to their audience and another tool to create new customers. The new update prohibit using Facebook as a publishing service! and here is a quote from the announcement "Businesses should think about their Page as a cornerstone of their online identity, not simply as a publishing service."


I really don't like this update as it will destroy everything related to business on Facebook, well i think Mark is doing this for two reasons:
1. To make the ordinary "non-business" users more happy by showing less links / more stories content.
2. To make people who are using Facebook for business pay more money on advertisement.
For him, this is the way to say "Everybody wins"

For details, check Facebook official announcement Here.

 

I think (perhaps naively) that there will be a big business backlash against this.

Facebook convinced companies to spend a lot of money on building an FB audience, as it was, supposedly, the best way to engage with their customers. Now Facebook are effectively holding those audiences for ransom, and telling businesses that they must pay again in order to speak to them.

I can foresee a legal case in the future where a company quotes wording that Facebook used when selling the company advertising to build "their" fan base.

My two pence's worth

Jason

 

This is right Jason, and i think this update started on my pages

 

this update is meant to cut spam post in pages. I think that is going to affect pages with little good content.

 

Sorry to hear about your pages.

I read a comment on a blog from a marketer who said his company spent about $10000 getting (quality) likes through paid FB ads and now their average post only reaches about 10% of them.

Speaking hypothetically (as I deleted my personal FB account a few years ago and now only have business pages), if I liked a page then I would want to see news from them. i might not neccesarily click "like" on that news, or comment on it, but I would read it. Therefore, I would be pretty annoyed for FB to decide that it wasn't going to show me any post from that company anymore, because I wasn't "interacting enough" with it. In my book, reading is still an interaction.

Fair point, Naina, but the key word in the definition of spam is "unsolicited". If somebody likes a page then it is not unsolicited. Obviously, if the page posts rubbish then that person has the option to "unlike" that page, but I don't think it's FB's place to decide if a page's content is of value to the fan or not.

An example that I read somewhere was for coupon sites, where people specifically follow them because they want links to special offers. FB would now effectively say to people, "No, you don't really want to be reading about that. We know what's best for you."

Just my opinion

Jason

 

I agree with you Jason, you examples were good to describe what i meant.
I have Facebook pages with +4.5M likes and all are affected by this update