This past week Facebook announced that beginning January 2015 we’ll all see less Facebook Pages doing their promotions in the News Feed. Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Most think that’s what a Facebook Page is for, to “promote” themselves, right? And if their fans are “Liking” their Page whether it’s chock full of offers or not, what’s the big deal?

Apparently there IS a big deal, to Facebook and their users. According to Facebook they surveyed hundreds of thousands of users and resoundingly they all said, less crap, more stuff I want to interact with.

After digging into what people “really” meant it was the promotions coming from the Pages they liked. “Download this”, “Buy that” was getting tired for Facebook users.

So Facebook is cracking down on:

• Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
• Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
• Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

Note, this is for “organic” promotional content only, not ads. So say for instance you sell BBQ sauce from a website and you tell all of your fans that you’re having a sale, click here to buy. According to Facebook, no-go.

Why the Facebook News Feed Update?

Facebook relies on having active users and engaged users and they think that they’ll start to lose them if there’s too much promotion-only content is our take. According to Facebook: “Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.”

You can’t read this and not think to yourself “Wait, Facebook isn’t making any money from these organic posts on Pages where people are being promotional, wouldn’t they want a piece of ad revenue from that?” We thought so.

Come January we’ll see how this goes but if you promote on your Facebook Page you might want to think about how you might re-word your promotions and offer up some great content to get people engaged with your business. Who knows, it might just work better!