Facebook is telling marketers to stop putting up posts that look like advertisements, unless they actually are paid promotions.
The social network said in a blog post that starting next year, users’ news feeds will show fewer posts that prompt readers to buy a product, install an application or enter a sweepstakes.
Facebook already limits the number of promotions that appear in a feed, so when free posts look like ads, it hurts a consumer’s experience, the company said.
The move spells more bad news for companies that spent years building up the number of “likes” on their Facebook brand pages, only to see their free posts reach fewer people as the news feed became more crowded.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the issue in a public question-and-answer session last week, saying that though he has "empathy" for businesses that went through the change, protecting the user experience on Facebook is more important.
"Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time,” Facebook said. "This change is about giving people the best Facebook experience possible and being responsive to what they have told us."
Zuckerberg has said that Facebook members on average have 1,500 posts they can see each day. To be one of the few they see, a business’s best bet is to pay for an ad, he said.
“Every day it becomes more and more clear that Facebook has abandoned social marketing, and is just a place to buy old- fashioned ads,” Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester Research, wrote in an e-mail.
“If you’re a brand, 98 per cent of your fans won’t see your next Facebook post, and 99.9 per cent won’t engage with that post and this change will only make matters worse.”
Bloomberg, edited by ESM
