This post by Frances Caballo originally appeared on his The Book Designer on 5/14/14.
If you have a Facebook page, have you noticed that fewer of your posts are reaching your fans’ news feeds?
You’re not alone. As Facebook moves further in the direction of monetization, and as it adjusts its algorithm, fewer of our Facebook page posts are reaching our fans.
Facebook’s reasons for the recent improvements make sense to some extent. A brand page (also called a company page or an author page) you liked when you were 37 may not be a page you have any interest in when you’re 42. Similarly, a friend you were close with four years ago could have moved away and may no longer be in your tight social sphere.
Facebook whittles your news feed to reflect your changing preferences based on your actions in the form of Likes, Shares and Comments.
According to a February 2014 Pew Research Center report, half of all adult Facebook users have more than 200 friends in their network. Users who are 29 and younger have even more.
In addition, last year AllFacebook reported that the average user had liked 40 pages but that figure is higher for residents of the United States, where the average user likes an estimated 70 pages.
In light of these numbers, Facebook assumes that the average user doesn’t have sufficient time to review every post from every friend and author page they’ve liked in the past several years. So the network steps in and determines which friends you’d prefer to hear from, based on your most frequent interactions, and decides which of your own posts from your Facebook page will appear in your fans’ news feeds.
In other words, if all of your fans don’t engage with your page on a regular basis, fewer and fewer over time will see any of your carefully written Facebook posts.
Research Proves that Organic Reach on Facebook Is Plummeting
Read the full post on The Book Designer.