For those of you responsible for looking after your company social media accounts, this thought may or may not have crossed your mind in the last couple weeks. It did mine. I follow (like) all our customers company Facebook pages to keep myself current on all the "goings on" at the company. Last week one of our great customers asked me if I saw a recent post to her company page and I had not, so I "hot-footed" it over to my Facebook tab looking for the post. I was nowhere to be found in my news feed. My initial thought was just maybe something had run amuck in the world of Facebook, and I had somehow my like of this page had gone unnoticed or worse deleted. I discovered after much diligent searching that neither was the case. According to my account settings, not only did I still like the page I loved it.
The same was true for a list as long as my arm for the remainder of my liked customer, as well as personal pages. The mystery continued to deepen until I did a few cursory Google searches on the topic. I found quite a bit of information addressing the topic. It is not unusual for Facebook to adjust their various algorithms controlling this and that. However, in my humble opinion, up until now they have for the most part been transparent to the average user. The latest adjustment made towards the end of 2013 was not. Unless you religiously follow the all the announcements, and who really has the time to do that? This one is one you must be aware of and as they say, "Adjust accordingly."
Facebook has implemented a new filtering scheme to control what posts show up in your new feed, based on interactions, from a simple view point. The immediate effect this has is to severely reduce the odds that you will see a post from liked page with which you don't interact. Personally as you might guess I have dozens of these. I enjoy reading the posts, but I seldom add my two cents. I've always felt if I had something meaningful to share I would, but the dozens of "Me too, me too, me too ...". I felt did not add anything and further just made it more difficult to read the posting. But, "Hey, that's just me ..."
You might ask, "Why does Facebook care?" Basically; they stated they are responding to customer desires to push the interesting stuff to the top. I may be wrong, but I think it is an attempt to encourage, and I do use that word lightly, business users to crack open their marketing wallet and bump more posts (think spend advertising dollars.) I don't really have a issue with this other than on two points:
• Could you have let all the customers (private and companies) know before we just stumbled upon it on our own?
• It ruffles my feathers a bit when someone is in essence telling me what to read.
• Could you please put in some option somewhere, no matter how obscure and difficult, to let us chose what shows in our news feed?
• It is only fair if the option is buried 17 levels deep, if we find it let us use it. Give a sense of accomplishment until the rules change again.
Oh; and by the way, this is MY TWO CENTS ...
UPDATE: I am now seeing updates from a "few" of my liked pages. To be honest I have no idea why or what I may have done to trigger this change in the behavior of my Facebook newsfeed. If any of you diehard Facebook experts out there have an answer, I would love to hear it. I've paged through the jungle of settings pages and found no joy. I know I can see the update traffic by going to the liked pages display, but I want to see them in my newsfeed like the good old days ...
