In May of 2012, Facebook unveiled a new feature for page owners. It was called “Promoted Posts,” and it allowed admins to pay a small to medium fee (reckoning on the follower base) with a view to hoist their posts to a more prominent placement in users’ news feeds. Basically, it allowed page owners to be sure their important posts were seen by more people, and provided a terrific revenue opportunity for Facebook.
A few months later, Facebook extended the Promoted Posts functionality to individual users. By October, anyone with an account could pay to advertise their witty status, cool new article, or cute new baby photo.
Ok, cool. Thus far so good. You might imagine that your complete Promoted Posts concept is wacky, but hey, to every his own. As a page owner, you may simply choose to not take part in Promoted Posts and go about your online business as usual simply posting away.
As a page owner, have you ever seen your average engagement decrease because the launch of Promoted Posts Have you ever used Promoted Posts Tell us within the comments.
Of course, that zen-like mentality could quickly disappear if, let’s say, Facebook was rigging the sport. And that’s exactly what some page owners began accusing Facebook of late last year: one giant bait-and-switch.
The “Bait-and-Switch”
Reports emerged that Facebook was deliberately decreasing the reach of normal, non-promoted posts so one can force people into procuring the Promoted Post product. In actuality, that was the entire point of revealing the feature to cast un-promoted posts into oblivion in order that people would see any such small return (likes, comments, and shares) that they’d don’t have any choice but to pay to advertise .
Most of the claims hinged at the simple observation by the accusers that posts published on their Facebook pages weren’t driving the traffic that they used to which naturally meant that not as a lot of people were seeing the posts of their news feeds. How could my likes be increasing, but my traffic from Facebook be decreasing
The common conclusion from people like Richard Metzger at Dangerous Times or even popular Facebook celebrities like George Takei (who hopped at the bandwagon) was that Facebook was turning down the quantity on their regular posts.
Although the accusation gained numerous steam within the tech media circles, Facebook maintained its innocence inside the matter. The corporate said, point blank, that they didn’t decrease the visibility of page posts so that it will force people into buying Promoted Posts.
And there has been some pretty compelling evidence to support Facebook’s innocence. Facebook has admitted that only around 16% or so of a page’s followers even see their posts within the news feed. It’s always been like this. Facebook hasn’t ever been capable of show 100% of followers 100% of posts from pages and folks they enroll in. There’s just too much competition for real estate within the news feed. As users start to friend increasingly more people and prefer progressively more pages, their overall engagement with each individual person and page goes naturally decrease.
Josh Constine over at TechCrunch suggested that a move that Facebook made to fight spam had actually been among the root causes of the so-called “visibility decreases” that many page owners were reporting.
“We made a comparatively large ranking change in September that was designed to attenuate spam complaints from users. We used [spam] reports at an aggregate level to locate Pages or apps generating a large number of reports [and reduce their reach]. We’ve also added personalized attempts to minimize presence of posts you’re prone to complain about,” said Facebook.
In short, the fewer engaging your posts were, the fewer likely they were to turn up to your followers’ news feeds.
And the frenzy to regulate spammy posts is just one news feed algorithm tweak that Facebook made and that they make a group, on a regular basis. Facebook is continually changing the manner its algorithms decide what shows up in whose news feed. The base line, in line with people who believed Facebook, was that sure, your post reach may very well be fluctuating (or maybe simply decreasing), however’s not because Facebook is pulling a bait-and-switch with Promoted Posts.
Still, page owners continued to complain that for them, personally, they were seeing less return from their posts. Sure, you may throw graphs and excuses on the issue, but you may’t explain that the decrease in visibility coincided with the dawn of Promoted Posts. Although Facebook was adamant that they’re not pulling this “bait-and-switch,” many page owners and public figures with many subscribers have remained unconvinced.
New Accusations
Fast forward to a few of days ago and to an editorial by Nick Bilton within the the brand new York Times’ “Bits” tech blog. It begins, “something is puzzling on Facebook.”
What it asserts is identical argument that we discussed above: Facebook is screwing you. Hard.
His story picks up soon after Facebook first allowed users to “subscribe” to public figures back in 2011. At that time, he had about 25,000 subscribers and his average article post on Facebook would receive a couple of hundred likes and no less than about a dozen shares (535 likes and 53 shares or 323 likes and 88 shares, numbers like that).
Today, he has over 400,000 subscribers. In case you think that suggests the selection of likes and shares per post could have increased 16-fold, you’re wrong.
“From the four columns I shared in January, i’ve got averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of different tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The hot York Times, and an analogous drop has occurred,” says Bilton.
So, he tested out a Promoted Post. After paying $7 to get certainly one of his article posts promoted by Facebook, he says that he saw a 1,000% increase in interaction in about a hours.
“It sort of feels as though Facebook isn’t just promoting my links on news feeds after I pay for them, but in addition possibly suppressing those i don’t pay for,” he concludes.
Fact Check
Although Facebook was denying this claim for months and months, this week was the 1st time that they published a lengthy “fact check” post at the topic.
In it, Facebook unequivocally states that it’s a false allegation.
“There were recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts so as to increase our revenue. This isn’t true.”
Facebook says that during reality, engagement has increased among folks who allow subscribers 34%, in reality. That suggests likes, comments, and shares.
“News Feed shows the foremost relevant stories out of your friends, people you follow and Pages you’re connected to. Actually, the scoop Feed algorithm is become independent from the advertising algorithm in that we don’t replace the foremost engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones,” says Facebook.
The “fact check” post seems to stem directly from and are available as some degreeed rebuttal to Bilton’s NYT article. Twice, Facebook makes a point to claim you can’t just compare anecdotal evidence from separate posts that occurred years apart.
The argument this is according to a number of anecdotes of 1 post from three hundred and sixty five days to a completely different post from another year.This can be an apples-to-oranges comparison; you can’t compare engagement rates on two different posts year over year.
For early adopters of Follow, we do see instances where their follower numbers have gone up but their engagement has gone down from a year ago. After we first launched Follow, the clicking coverage combined with our marketing efforts drove large adoption. lots of users started following public figures who had turned on Follow. Through the years, a number of those users engaged less with those figures, and so we started showing fewer stories from those figures to users who didn’t engage as much with their stories. The inside track Feed changes we made within the fall to target higher quality stories can have also decreased the distribution for less engaging stories from public figures.
Read: that aforementioned spam adjustment. Facebook is saying that yes, we adjust the scoop feed algorithm to expose users more relevant posts, but we’re by no means decreasing organic reach to force our Promoted Posts product on people.
All this being said, Facebook is taking it head on. For plenty of Facebook users, trust in Big Blue isn’t a standard emotion. For page owners and popular figures who’ve seen their engagement decline, it could be hard to swallow that there’s not something malicious taking place here.
Do you suspect Facebook once they say that they’re not decreasing visibility of non-promoted posts so that you can generate revenue from Promoted Posts Tell us within the comments.
