Your Facebook Business Page Is About to Get a Lot Less Traffic

Your Facebook Business Page Is About to Get a Lot Less Traffic

In a post to Facebook, Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed plans to change up your news feed once again. In a renewed effort to help people stay connected, Facebook will be further limiting the number of posts people will see from brands, businesses, and media on their feed, opting to increase the number of posts from friends and family. What will this mean for your photography business page?

Many Facebook page managers have long noticed the tightening of impressions, likes, and shares their posts receive, and now there will be an acknowledged effort to reduce them further. Zuckerberg recognizes this in his message and expects “the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down.” To counter, he adds, “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.” Read the full post below.

What are your thoughts on this new goal by Facebook? Is the social network still central to your marketing? Will you continue to publish content to your pages knowing fewer people will be seeing it?

Photo via Pixabay.

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Ryan Mense is a wildlife cameraperson specializing in birds. Alongside gear reviews and news, Ryan heads selection for the Fstoppers Photo of the Day.

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24 Comments

Facebook for small business is essentially dead, I have more or less abandoned my ~20k follower business page because the reach is always dismal, even on content that goes somewhat viral on other platforms. They want hundreds or thousands of dollars to 'boost' posts.

What I find annoying is that people liked my page for a reason - to see the content - but then it isn't shown to them. I have no problem with facebook scaling back unsolicited posts and advertising, but if someone actually went out of their way to like or follow my page, it would be nice if they could see what they signed up for.

I agree, and especially when people explicitly "follow" a page.

What that idiot is failing to understand is that not all pages are lawn companies offering discounts. A lot of pages offer entertainment and content for free to the users of his over-rated site. That's like Apple hiding apps and games from their devices and expecting people to want to use an empty shell. If it's all about friends and family they can send pics and text each other from their phones. This is nothing more than him pushing business owners farther into the corner so he can get that boost money.

Any company that tries to compete (instagram), he either buys out or completely rips off (snapchat).

Yep. It's all about that blue "Boot Post" button.
But it's nice to pretend he's doing it so people get along better socially.

The sooner that platform dies the better. The quantity and quality of traffic that they claim to be originators of is highly suspect. I have never received any ‘actual’ business in photography or my photographic safaris from Facebook. I believe that they outright lie about their analytics for promoted content too.

Don't worry, Facebook pages can now add you as a follower apparently (source: https://redd.it/7psd54)

I don't have a business page on FB, but I just deactivated my personal page yesterday. I'm beyond tired of FB determining what I see and what I don't.

For someone like me who has abandoned social media like facebook and instagram for marketing this is actually great news.

I have close to 13k followers on FB but it really doesn't mean anything.

Oh cool. Can we get a refund on what we've spent on boosting posts in the last year then? 😞 The reason many of us started paying for ads and boosting posts on FB was that our stuff wasn't being seen. It seems that over time more money meant nothing, and the views kept going down no matter how much we spent. Seems like they've been phasing business pages out for a while.

And while I definitely agree that people should be spending less time on Facebook, I don't agree about businesses not bringing people together, especially small local businesses. Big corporations? Obviously. But the little guys can be what hold communities together. This platform used to be invaluable to them. Now it looks like we have to move on.

I quite dislike Facebook for the simple reason they do not allow me to create the feed I want. They create the feed they want me to see. The feed they show me is ridiculous. Some of it is outdated. The people I want to hear from is hardly presented. I typically have to visit individual friends and family pages to get any update. It certainly doesn't scroll through with consistency on my feed. For any websites that I remotely care about I set up RSS feeds in Firefox and visit them that way if available. If not I set up favorites in my browser. I'm simply done trying to get my news and information from Facebook. I wish people would stop using it but that doesn't seem even remotely likely.

Closed my Facebook profile last January and haven't updated my Facebook page in over six months, I might close it also. I find it completely useless and a waste of valuable time.

Closed my personal account and business page years ago and haven't missed them.

Should have done it earlier :-) Cheers.

Well great! My facebook business page basically gets no traffic as it is haha

No kidding! I've spent way too much time on my business page with no return. Might be time to delete it.

I was contemplating whether or not I should pay for boosting my posts on facebook but now my mind is made up and I definitely won't be. I'm starting to dislike facebook more and more by the day.

What a pin head this guys is... The social world according to him, not according to the demand of the customer. Now it's time to control how, when, why and where we communicate and with who by individuals like this who believe they know better than we do because we're just too stupid to choose our own path. This will will bring about another social giant eventually that will understand the concept of freedom. At that point FB will go the route of Kmart, JC Penney and Sears. Rightly so...

Yep. Pay to play. Post something on your business page and … nothing.
But wait… there's more! You'll see endless "Only you can see this post… For $50 you can reach ______ people. Boost this post now." And "notifications" suggesting the same thing. And if you ignore all that, emails suggesting it.

Hey, it's their site, and they can do what they want. And they are. Just don't build your castle on someone else's sand and then cry when they change the rules. FaceBook. Instagram, etc.

Fuck you Zuckerberg. This isn't about friends and family. This is about you making more money requiring businesses to pay for advertising. You have everyone by the short and curlys because there isnt another platform that can compete.

There is a World out of FB, it's called the web… For the last 5 years, I have heard people constantly complaining about FB, and yet they are still on it, giving it their personal info and content.

At some point you need to be consistent and LEAVE IT !…

Well I'm not happy of what is going on with Facebook pages, some of you have deleted accounts, but... What else do you propose in the place of Facebook? Any new platform for sharing, gaining audience? Any tips in that area would be great to have, as I would say a lot of us are in same boat and I guess many of us would switch somewhere else.