Businesses and non-profits that have depended upon Facebook Inc. for free promotion may soon find it necessary to pay Facebook to deliver their posts to people who have already said they want to receive them.

Beginning in January, Facebook says it will dramatically cut the number of promotional messages that appear in users’ news feeds. Facebook’s hope — the one they talk about — is this filtering will improve the quality and relevance of the items seen by users. The unspoken part is the desire to make companies pay to use Facebook to promote their businesses.

I am mixed on what Facebook is doing. It won’t reduce the commercial content we see on the service; it will just be paid advertising instead of free posts. My concern is that do-gooder groups will be hurt by the change if they are unable to pay.

There are also some questions: If I’ve told Facebook I want to see particular content, why can’t they just show it to me and let me decide? And why can’t I subscribe and see all posts from a person or organization in my news feed?

Maybe each Facebook page and group could get a slider — Google News-style — that controls how much of its content I receive. That would place more power in my hands and less in Facebook’s.

The public radio program, Marketplace, did a report on the change, announced last month, and Facebook’s search for increased profits:

For years, companies have been begging customers and would-be customers to “like” their pages on Facebook. Once you do, that store or local restaurant starts competing with your friends and family for space in your newsfeed. Increasingly, Facebook’s algorithms filter out those commercial posts.

Nate Elliot, an analyst with Forrester Research, says very little of what companies post these days gets seen. “Ever since Facebook started selling ads on its site, mysteriously, it started showing a lot less of brands’ content (to) those brands’ fans on Facebook,” he says.

We know overly promotional content when we see it

You may have been involved in the testing that helped drive this change. In recent months, I was asked several times during Facebook sessions to view real posts and rate them as being too promotional or not. Sensing something was afoot, I did this several times and was careful to give small businesses and non-profits benefit of the doubt.

The posts presented to me were either blatantly promotional — download this, buy that — or just fine. Not a lot of gray area.

According to Facebook, the survey found some “consistent traits” that make posts seem too promotional to those it surveyed:

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

If Facebook’s implementation is as clear-cut as the research I participated in suggests, they really are about to improve the quality of what users see. This will force companies to add more value to their posts and limit outright selling.

Paying for what used to be free

If your business is receiving significant promotional benefit from its Facebook page and posts, expect to begin paying — perhaps significantly — for the same results. Previously, paying was optional, in the future you must change your content to be less promotional and/or pay to gain wide Facebook exposure.

It is not clear what this means to non-profits, who are already caught in the “Facebook wants money” bind. It is not widely understood that a Facebook “like” for a page or group is not like a subscription. The like does not assure you of getting all or even most of the posts to a group or page.

The more you like, comment upon and share group and page content, the more you will see from that group or page. But with posts typically only reaching a low double-digit percentage of people who like a page or group, Facebook seems more useful that it may prove to be. Unless, of course, you or your group is willing/able to pay Facebook advertising rates.

The animal rescue groups that I work with have been very successful doing animal lost-and-found, last-minute shelter saves and even adoptions from their Facebook groups and pages. It is sad these groups should have to use donated dollars to pay to reach people who have already expressed an interest in their groups.

That is what Facebook expects them to do. It’s not like Facebook doesn’t add a lot of value and doesn’t help save many lives.

The problem is groups having to decide whether to spay/neuter an animal today or buy some additional views on Facebook. The other problem is groups becoming sophisticated enough to spend their Facebook money effectively.

I suspect other groups and causes have this same love/hate relationship with Facebook, but I doubt it is going to change.

photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc