Facebook is screwing publishers yet again but (maybe) that’s a good thing

So, most of our social media traffic comes from Facebook. We haven’t quite figured out Twitter yet. Instagram was never really our thing. And LinkedIn is difficult. Way more difficult than Facebook, even with all the changes Facebook is bringing.

But Mark wants us to change our game. In fact, he is forcing us to. You see we have a little more than 5,600 people on our page. About five years ago, reaching to all these people would’ve been pretty straightforward. You write a post, share it on your page, and most of them if not all will see it in their newsfeed.

But then Facebook wanted to make (more) money, obviously. So they kind of killed the organic reach of pages. Over the last few years, it has been declining and now is almost zero. Not exactly zero, but let us exaggerate a little bit. Okay, let’s give you some context. To be able to reach the people on our page, we have to sponsor almost all the content that we share. It’s funny but yeah we pay for people to discover our content and read it. The very same people who liked our page so they could discover such content. But that’s how Facebook works. If we don’t do that, our content would not even reach 500 people, which is not even 10% of the people on our page. In some cases, the reach has dropped to 2-3%.

And it’s pretty much the same even if you’re a page with hundreds of thousands of likes. So if you’re a page like MENAbytes with ~6,000 likes or Wamda that has over 300,000 likes, eventually you have to pay Facebook to be able to reach the audience you’ve taken months or years to build. Try to go through last 10 or 20 posts by Wamda and you won’t see double-digit engagement on any of them. That’s because they don’t sponsor all their content.

But that’s not what this article (or post or whatever you like to call it) is about. It is about what Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed. All those changes that we had been hearing about News Feed have been confirmed by the Facebook boss in the following post.

So what he’s essentially saying is that the organic reach will drop to ZERO or atleast that’s how publishers are supposed to read it. Now they’re doing to be able to increase the interactions that matter the most to people who use Facebook, interactions with their friends and family, which is a good thing. That’s what Facebook was made for and that is how it’s supposed to work. But this also means that publishers, businesses, brands or anyone else who uses Facebook pages to push their content are screwed. Big time. Especially those who relied on clickbait and viral content.

But maybe it’s a good thing. It’s time for every publisher (us included) to rethink their whole distribution strategy and figure out new or better ways for their content to be discovered.

We will be putting more efforts into Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Newsletter, direct traffic. It’s time you do the same. And if you’re one of our regular readers and like our content, please do follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Also, please subscribe to our mailing list below.