Facebook signals end to news feed reach for non-promoted posts
Facebook is set to trial yet another shake-up of its news feed which would see it expunge non-promoted media posts, a move which is already having a devastating impact on smaller publishers.
Facebook signals end to non-promoted posts news feed reach
While members will still receive notifications of posts made by friends, all non-promoted posts from commercial channels will be diverted to a secondary feed dumping ground, restricting users primary feed to just content posted by friends and adverts.
The new system is being trialled in six countries initially but has already brought about a concurrent drop in people’s engagement with Facebook Pages. One publication to be hit by the change is Slovakian newspaper Dennik N which reportedly saw its reach decline by two-thirds on Thursday and Friday compared with previous days.
This dovetails with measurements conducted by Facebook-owned analytics service CrowdTangle in Slovakia, which found that the majority of the 60 largest Facebook pages in the country had seen their channel reach contract by between two-thirds and three-quarters.
Explaining its rationale behind the move Facebook wrote: “With all of the possible stories in each person’s feed, we always work to connect people with the posts they find most meaningful. People have told us they want an easier way to see posts from friends and family, so we are testing two separate feeds, one as a dedicated space with posts from friends and family and another as a dedicated space for posts from Pages.”
In the meantime however Facebook has affirmed that it has no intention of rolling the changes out worldwide.