Facebook gets candid about what marketers on Facebook have surely begun experiencing and perhaps even fretting about– your reach will continue to drop, unless you pay for it.

In a sales deck surfaced by AdAge, Facebook makes it plain as day: “We expect 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.”

The organic reach metric has been an often frustrating and unsteady one for marketers as they followed best practices to see reach on their Facebook posts go out to only a small slice of followers. In spite of all the all the alarm bells going off, Facebook continued to maintain that their algorithmic changes were instituted purely to create better quality news feeds for users. Now it looks like Facebook is strong-arming marketers into spending more to meet old reach goals.

While a “like” on Facebook may feel like a vote of confidence, expecting to see what gets posted in your newsfeed, Facebook has been consistently tweaking what gets seen. It is more likely that you’ll see a page’s post if you continually interact with that page.

Also worrying is the implication that accruing more fans for your page is simply the method to making your paid ads more effective. “Your brand can fully benefit from having fans when most of your ads show social context, which increases advertising effectiveness and efficiency,” says Facebook.

One has to wonder if this is the appropriate time for Facebook to be taking aggressive paywall-esque measures for marketer’s to have impact on the platform, considering a very key demographic has begun to head to other social sites. Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat have notably not instituted anything like Facebook’s severely algorithm-tweaked news feed.

So, there you have it. Time to pay up.

 

Source: AdAge