You may have noticed recently that the organic reach of your posts have slowly been declining the past few months. For months we’ve been telling our clients that Facebook is quickly becoming a pay-to-play platform; that you will need to start buying ads to maintain the reach that you had before. While Facebook maintained that they’ve made changes in their algorithm to weed out spammy posts which wouldn’t greatly effect organic reach, but denied making changes to encourage marketers to spend more on ads to maintain their reach.

Well, in a paper recently published by Facebook titled “Generating Business Results on Facebook,” the company admits that “organic distribution of an individual Page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.” Further on in the paper Facebook changed the reason for growing a fan base from generating social interactions to “increasing advertising effectiveness.” Clearly, the company is encouraging marketers to commit ad dollars.

This recently development is very frustrating because many companies like to give out great content to fans that bring great value to them. When a visitor decides to “like” a page they are saying that they like the content and want more and expect to see it in their news feeds. What they don’t know is now Facebook is making us pay to bring them that content.

So what can you do?

Educate your fans! But don’t complain, nobody likes a complainer. Facebook has legitimate reasons for making these changes, one contributing factor is the increase in adoption by companies and thus higher competition for space on news feeds. Plus, it is a business after all and businesses need to make money.

What I mean about educating your fans, is to let them know that they may suddenly see a drop in your content appearing in their news feeds, this isn’t because you’ve slowed down or aren’t publishing content anymore. If your fan’s see a drop in content they just might decided to unfollow you. Let your fan’s know that there are others ways they can receive your content – like subscribing to your emailing list.

You can also let your fans know that they can subscribe to your content by telling Facebook that they want to “get notifications” from your page. How they would do that is hover on the “like” button and a drop down menu will open then they can select “get notifications.” Once they have that selected your content will show up on their news feed.

This development also means that you now really need to up your game when it comes to your content. If you’re asking people to subscribe to you, then you better make damn sure it’s worth it! A good tip is to look at your Google analytics and see what keywords are bringing people to your site. There’s a good chance that what their interested in, so create content around it!

If you like the content that we’re creating please subscribe to our weekly Marketing Minute eblasts, and like us on Facebook and turn on “Get Notifications.” You won’t regret it, I promise!