Facebook Fan Pages have made a recent change that has many of us in the business world shaking are fists at Facebook. As you know, earlier this year Facebook went public. It has for the most part been FREE. As with any business that goes public, you have shareholders to please. On the day of Facebook’s IPO, many wondered, how will Facebook generate revenue. Ding! Ding! Ding! You now know.

EdgeRank Rears Its Ugly Head Again

Before we go deep into why EdgeRank is rearing its ugly head. Exactly what is it? EdgeRank is Facebook’s “super secret” algorithm that determines what is shown in a user’s news feed. EdgeRank calculates out among your fans which is frequently appearing and might be the most relevant for them to consider.

Earlier this year it was discovered, and then Facebook openly admitted that only 16% of your fans actually SEE your posts. Naturally many of us were upset by that admission. At this point many fan page admins adjusted their strategies to figure out how more users can view their content.

Fast forward to today. The reach now is even LOWER. Check out PageLever’s study here. In case you couldn’t bring yourself to click the link, their study shows that page reach is now only 3%-7.5%. Facebook claims there has not been a change to their algorithm. We just are not buying it! Facebook fan pages have changed moving forward.

Facebook Has To Monetize

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook went public and now they have shareholders to answer to. So welcome to Promoted Posts and Offers. Promoted posts lets page owners with more than 400 fans pay as little as $1 to promote any post created during the previous three days. Paying to promote the post means it will be shown in the news feed of more of your fans than you would normally reach, and friends of your fans are also more likely to see the post.

Directly from Facebook’s website: Certain businesses, brands and organizations can share discounts with their customers by posting an offer on their Facebook Page. Offers are like coupons and don’t cost anything to create. When someone claims an offer, they’ll receive an email that they can show at the page’s physical location to get the discount.

These are one of the two ways Facebook is bringing in revenue. The days of FREE are over. Now understand that you are not paying to post on Facebook. You are paying for your posts to get more reach. If you are an entrepreneur, you understand the need to monetize. Unfortunately Facebook fan pages was the first area they decided to make money.

So What Is The Big Deal?

Here is the big deal. We went from 16% to 3%-7.5%. There is something wrong here. Myself and many other page administrators have noticed a considerable drop in reach. Others suspect what is wrong is Facebook Insights. This may be true, but no one really knows as Facebook stays tight lipped about how they do things.There has been a lot of speculation of what Facebook is doing, but we may never know.

The biggest argument is Facebook has generally made it somewhat difficult for Facebook fan pages to be successful with the EdgeRank algorithm, and now businesses are suppose to pay to have their content reach more users. Many small businesses feel Facebook is putting the squeeze on their Facebook efforts.

Page admins now more than ever must review their Facebook Insights to learn what content gets the most reach and engagement.Once you have done so, start posting similar content. No matter what Facebook does with Facebook fan pages, we have to play by their rules.

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