Facebook traffic has been the major source of referral traffic for a lot of blogs but in recent months there have been complaints that Facebook traffic has dried up. A lot of bloggers have noticed a decline in the amount of traffic from Facebook. Facebook has been a source of massive traffic for a lot of bloggers but this may not be same anymore after the latest news feed tweaking.
When people like or follows your Facebook fan page, they will most likely see every post you publish on their news feed timeline and the traffic conversion used to be good enough. But now Facebook has introduced the “Promote Post” feature with the aim of getting you to pay for advertisement to get your posts promoted.
It is no more news that Facebook favors the advertisement model for their site monetization and won’t be sending you any more free Facebook traffic. Facebook has tweaked their algorithm to only show posts they believe will generate high level of user engagement and filter out those they feel won’t. This has negatively affected bloggers as only a fraction of your total fans can now see the posts you have shared.
Facebook explained that in a bid to save people time and only show them posts that means something to them, they rank information from people, apps and pages based on such user’s level of engagement and the frequency of visiting Facebook. Facebook went ahead to explain that to address the fact that not everyone can see every single post from their liked fan pages or posts made by friends, they are offering a promotional tool like Promote Posts so you can reach more people.
So many people have claimed that Facebook is deliberately gaming the news feed so people will pay more advertisement money. Facebook itself claimed that though the news feed is occasionally changed; it still works just the way.
No matter how you choose to look at it, I believe Facebook has only one aim in mind while choosing which item to show on the news feed – MONEY! Facebook want to earn more advertisement money, how can Facebook earn money when they send you free Facebook traffic?
I believe Facebook should let fans and followers see all the posts in their news feeds and unlike/unsubscribe anyone they do not want anymore especially if such posts clutter their news feed. The idea of filtering the news feed to reduce the number of people who see which posts by tweaking their algorithm defeats the idea of someone liking or subscribing to a fan page at first. This will be denying a user the feed content he subscribed to when he pressed the “like” button on a fan page.
Your Facebook traffic has dried up as a result of Facebook filtering news feed content and this has reduced the number of people who sees your posts whenever your publish on Facebook. So to reach a wider percentage of your fans, you are expected to pay for promotion of your post so it will be suggested to them. So basically Facebook has said they want to offer their users better content via news filtering but if paid will suggest the junk they filtered out at first to them.
Let me hear from your, share your experience with me. How has the Facebook news feed tweak affected the traffic you used to receive from Facebook? When you check your Facebook fan page insight, how many percent of your total fans see your posts when you share them? Use the comment section below to share with me. If you have any suggestions or recommendations don’t hesitate to ask. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feeds while you are on it.
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I agree with you Nwosu !
Facebook is manipulating interests of people to earn more cash ..and its a sad news that many bloggers have lost their referral traffic ..this would have seriously affected the bloggers whose key source of income was from this traffic .
-Pramod
Facebook itself have not denied this totally, glad you could agree with me. Have you noticed it yourself?
They have limiting access to fb pages for a while now and the “original” traffic has died down considerably, no to mention that they have (I am sure, a method of blocking from view any post that contains a web address.
As fas as I am concerned FB has “hoocked us” and is reversing is tracks on “social media’.
Frankly, if I would not have so many important contacts I would have left over a year ago!!
It is a little dictatorship.
What is worst is that in the process they are brainwashing million into compliance. Starting with the provision of only the “like” choice, when there is so much not to like!!!
Glad i am not the only one feeling this way about Facebook, their ultimate aim is how to make more money for themselves and to dominate the social media just like Google dominated the internet. Thanks for your comment and i hope you visit again.
It seems that facebook is now aiming to earn only. They focusing only on earning rather than spreading. Good observation Nwosu.
Thanks Sanket for your contribution.