How many times have you seen a page on Facebook that says, “Like or share this page!” Maybe it’s a page for hilarious cat videos or possibly a one of your favorite brands. Now Facebook has decided to put the kibosh on this behavior by officially announcing that pages asking people to “Like or share” their content will be punished.
According to Facebook:
Today we are announcing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would. Our update targets three broad categories of this type of feed spam behavior. (source – Facebook Newsroom)
Like Google Facebook is trying to clean things up and if Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are any indicator of what’s to come, it could be a rough ride for some brands. Habit changes are hard, especially for brands that use Facebook as their main source of customer acquisition.
Just like JC Penny was crushed by Google’s algorithm updates, the same could very likely start happening to other brands on Facebook. Of course this is how the Internet works, products and services launch, become popular, and then work hard to curate the massive amount of content they manage.
I see changes like this as opportunities, the chance for some companies to get an edge that might not have been available before. Where that edge is I don’t know yet, but since Facebook is a major customer acquisition channel for us you bet I’ll be testing quite a few different techniques.
If you want to read more about Facebook’s move to clean up their Newsfeed make sure to read the full post in their newsroom.
