I have watched the evolution of Facebook pages closely over the last two years; mainly because I have a dog in the fight. I spent a lot of money on promoting Facebook pages for my websites; spurred on by the promotional nudge of Facebook themselves.
Sadly, page reach has decreased significantly over the last two years. From a user point of view, I realise that this was necessary due to Facebook users liking every page they come across. The result being that, over time, their own user experience was suffering about it.
Though from a website owner’s point of view, it has been frustrating to deal with the changes that Facebook introduce frequently (something I discussed in-depth last year).
It seems that Facebook have decided to change things up again. I read a short post on Engadget two days ago entitled “Facebook wants to clean up spam in your News Feed“.
The updated news feed will apparently show less spammy posts. They will be negating the affects of:
- “Like-Baiting” posts that ask users to like, share or comment.
- Updates that contain photos and videos that have been uploaded in the past.
- Links that trick you into clicking through to a page with lots of ads.
When I initially read the post, I thought to myself “Oh no, here we go again”. I was quick to realise that this is good news. I am sick of all these pages who are getting ahead by posting the same photos over and over again; not to mention all of those pages that are growing exponentially by using the “Tag a Friend” suggestion in updates.
This is clearly bad news for viral websites that have been using aggressive marketing techniques to get ahead of the crowd. For the rest of us, a cleaner news feed with less clutter will hopefully mean we get a better response from our own Facebook pages.
Kevin