Many disapproving articles have appeared recently surrounding Facebook’s new policies, particularly those that determine how businesses can “promote” their posts to their viewing audience.

Once upon a time, businesses small and large flocked to Facebook to use its free platform to gain followers and alert them to business happenings, offer special promotions, and share witty anecdotes or bits of company culture. Many businesses put decent amounts of effort into special social media campaigns to grow their audience each time they had something to say. Once a user “liked” a company’s Facebook page, they were signed up to receive updates in their news feed regarding the company. Historically, Facebook has been a great tool to level the playing field between small and large businesses. Whoever put forth the effort to attract new followers would prosper from having their growing audience’s attention, no matter their size.

Over the last year however, things changed. Many companies started to realize a severe decline in the number of followers reached with each post. This decline was a mystery until Facebook revealed its new policy of charging for posts. In early 2012 Facebook went from allowing unfettered reach of a company’s postings to allowing only 15% of its followers to view their posting for free. The other 85% now had to be paid for. The full impact of this new policy won’t be known for some time but consider the position of companies that have sunk vast resources into the Facebook environment and now have a fraction of the visibility they had just months ago.

Not surprisingly the “charge to promote” program coincides with a drop in viewership–a mere coincidence attests Facebook, who claims to only be limiting the amount of advertising posted on users walls (i.e. company posts) to keep the site relatively uncluttered for the users sake. They say that as brand’s Facebook postings have increased largely in the past few years, they have felt the need to prune out some of the company postings to keep a users news feeds interesting rather than relying on users to self regulate via “unliking” or “hiding posts from this user”.

Costs range from $5 to thousands of dollars depending on how large of an audience you want to reach. While this may seem reasonable for certain companies with large advertising budgets, a majority of smaller businesses are having trouble deciding what to make of the program. They are unable to afford promoting each of their posts, especially if they are a company with a large group of followers that posts relatively often, but they have invested a lot of time and money in gaining these followers in the first place. Many people feel that if fans have already “liked” your page, and thus opted in to receive updates from you, that you shouldn’t have to then further pay to be put in front of these people. Because wasn’t that the whole concept of gaining “likes” in the first place – free connections with fans?

As a fan/user, there are a few ways to ensure you still receive posts from your favorite brands regularly if you so wish. First off, visit any brand you wish to keep seeing posts from and make sure that you have checked to show their posts in your news feed.

While this should keep a company in your news feed, it hasn’t been determined yet if this actually shows you every post from that company.

You can also opt to regularly check out your Pages Feed (located on the left hand bar on your home page).

A surefire way to make sure the companies you love are easily accessible to you are to create Interest Lists and add various companies to these. Then, upon selecting the Interest Lists you can see all posts from related companies.

Here are the steps:
1. Go to any Company Page that you like. Hover over/click the Liked box and select “Add to Interest Lists”

2. In the new menu that opens, select + New List.

3. Select the company you wish to appear in the list and select Next.

4. Create a List Name, select your settings, and select Done.

5. When on your Home page, you will see an Interests category on the left hand side. Selecting the different Interest categories you have created will allow you to see all recent postings from companies in that category.

Hopefully users will become aware of these workarounds and small businesses that have put large efforts into growing their fan base won’t have to count those as wasted efforts or bow out of the Facebook community due to lack of promotional funds to expel on getting posts in front of fans.

Obviously Facebook, like all companies, needs to scratch out ways to monetize itself, but was it fair to wall off a large chunk of businesses’ established followers with its new pay model? Was it underhanded or just part of the new Internet reality and we should get used to this sort of thing? Most importantly, what will be the fallout for business moving forward? How will they find value now that they have to pay to reach an audience that was until recently, essentially free?

Share: