In an effort to the find the right mix of content for people’s News Feed, Facebook announced three updates. While the updates aim to improve the experience for most users, these changes could have a negative impact on business pages.

While many brands and marketers have become immune to Facebook’s frequent algorithm updates, it’s still a good idea to understand them. To help you do that, we’ll break down these recent changes and how they might impact you.

1. Improving the experience for people with limited content

Before this update, users with a smaller group of friends, or fewer liked pages, would see a limited amount of content. Facebook prohibited multiple posts from the same source from appearing in the News Feed. This update now allows users to see more than one post from the same publisher in their feed.

2. Content from Friends supersedes content from Brands

Users complained they missed important updates from close friends. This was especially critical for those with large networks due to the amount of content flowing through their News Feed. With this update, items such as photos, videos, status updates, or links from closest connections will appear higher in the feed so there is a higher likelihood you will see them.

3. Notifications about your Friends liking or commenting on a post will appear lower in News Feed

Facebook users “don’t enjoy seeing stories about their friends liking or commenting on a post.” This update will make these updates appear lower in News Feed or not at all, so you can actually see the content directly from friends and the pages you have liked.

How will these updates affect your Business Page?

Facebook is not sugarcoating anything with this announcement in regard to how it will impact Business Pages. In the blog post, they state the impact on Page distribution will “vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity.” They do warn that “in some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline.”

This could mean brands and businesses will have to pay an even larger premium to be seen in users News Feeds. What do you think about this latest Facebook News Feed update? We’d love to hear your opinion in the comments.

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