Facebook Nails Small Businesses With News Feed Changes

Are you finding that your fan engagement has dropped on Facebook? If you have under 1,000 fans most likely your activity has dropped or come to a crashing  halt on your Facebook Business Page. Why? This study may shed some interesting insight in regards to what is happening to the traffic on your Facebook Business Page.

“Pages with less than 1,000 fans saw a decrease in engagement. Pages with more than 1,000 fans saw a steady increase in engagement, right up to Pages with over 100,000 fans, which saw a 27.8% increase in the rate of engagement.”

“When you consider how the news feed now works, with the vast amount of content and updates being shared, it is evident why the number of fans will become more important. You need a higher number to increase the chances of your content being found.” Read the full article and see the graphs.

Facebook made sweeping changes on September 30th and again on October 31st to how it distributes your business content to fans, and the shake down in the month of October was dramatic.

“The study from Edgerank Checker has found  that over a sample of over 5,800 random Pages, 82% experienced a reduction in the amount of impressions on the Page.”

Yikes, that is scary. Your content, that you are working so hard to create for Facebook users, is getting lost in the noise. It appears that a standard two updates a day that many were using (to prevent spamming readers) in this new world on Facebook, will mean that your message gets lost in the shuffle.

As businesses and brands react to this new world, many are turning to Facebook advertising and Facebook sponsored stories to get the exposure they want. It will be interesting to see just where these changes Facebook is making will take us in the weeks and months to come. I personally am predicting a strong push from Facebook to move businesses into their pay per click program.