Facebook Changes Continue to Limit Reach

For the past few years, Facebook has been a go to social media site for small and medium sized businesses and nonprofits.  The space gave these smaller organizations a way to reach an audience for little or no investment.  Sure, ads could be bought but growing a following organically was much preferred.  Organic growth of  "likes” often times resulted in more engagement for the page and more viral sharing.Over the course of the past few years, Facebook has tweaked the algorithm repeatedly.  With each tweak, page owners found their reach diminishing, making it harder to reach an audience.  Updates stopped appearing in the newsfeeds of a number of followers and page administrators soon found the “Boost Post” option appearing at the bottom of each post.  For a fee, a boosted post could appear on more newsfeeds, increasing the reach of a page and in turn the level of engagement.This week Facebook announced another tweak. They will no longer be promoting status updates that lack an image.  Pages posting simple text updates will find their reach greatly decreased, while updates with images attached have a greater chance of reaching an audience.  Facebook will not guarantee all followers will have the updates in their news feeds though.The intent is to populate newsfeeds with more updates by friends and less by pages. One way around the challenge would be for page administrators to share page updates on their personal page. It may not reach the entire list of followers, but posts will have a better reach overall.Pages administrators may soon find the only way to reach an audience is to pay for coverage.  Companies with deep pockets may have no trouble paying for reach. Smaller retailers, etsy shop owners or non-profits with limited budgets may not find Facebook to be effective for their social media marketing.  At some point, larger companies may turn their attention to other more cost effective marketing mediums, leaving Facebook altogether.