Facebook, the largest social network in the world, requires companies and advertising brokers to buy “audience” for users of their pages following changes made to the algorithm which picks the news that appear on the Facebook page, writes the Financial Times.
Many of the companies that have attracted millions of Facebook users through the “Like” button realize now that their posts are accessed infrequently and are forced to pay to stand out of the crowd through the “Sponsored Stories” service.
Facebook officials said that a post which gathers many hits, likes, comments and shares will be visible to more users. The algorithm tends to give more prevalence to pictures and movies against posts having only text.
“We continue to optimize the flow of news to display posts that people are most likely to access, raising the visibility of the most interesting articles. Our vision is that all this content should be as relevant as posts coming from friends and family,” said Facebook.
The algorithm of the social network, “Edge Rank” is created in such a way as to promote the most interesting content equally, whether it is posted by a company or an individual.
A recent study by two groups of media marketing, “We are social” and “Socialbakers” found a “significant reduction” of almost 50% since august, of the number of fans for the messages posted by the companies. While Facebook said in May that 16% of a company page fans can see each post, the study showed that the percentage actually dropped to 12%.
“EdgeRank always worked this way, but now it has been improved, allowing companies to compete for a much smaller slice of newsfeeds” said Robin Grant, director of the “We are social”.
The U.S. company seeks to improve the user experience by displaying only those streams that are of interest to fans, filtering spamming ads distributed by companies or friends alike. This arouses the same discontent that has faced Google, another great source of online traffic.
Companies that once relied on the fact that will automatically climb in the Google search rankings discovered at some point that if they want to ensure visibility, they have to pay for sponsored results and/or use optimization tactics for search engines.
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