Facebook now says the drop in pages was a "mistake"
If you run a Facebook fanpage, you have probably noticed the huge drop in reach during October, and the exponential drop in engagement and likes that comes with that, we all think this was because Facebook was making changes in their algorithm again, and they were pushing us into using ads for improving our metrics, we thought fb was not going to give away reach any more.
I personally notices this drop last month, some of my pages that usually had more than 10k reach every week, suddenly dropped to 3000 or 5000 in the best cases, I tried using different kinds of content and nothing seemed to work, only videos could get a small increase.
Well, a few days ago, Facebook announce that this was actually produced by a bug, according to them, this bug generated a malfunction in the mechanism that counted reactions, comments and shares in organic posts (it didn't affect promoted posts), so because of this, the posts that were made between October 4 and October 14 were not correctly measured, apparently, the reach and the engagement was there, we just couldn't see them.
This is not the first time this happens, just a few weeks ago, Facebook also announced that a similar mistake affected the videos metrics, enlarging the number of "views".
I believe there a few points we can discuss about this new, first of all, do you think Facebook will start having some reputation problems regarding its metrics system? This is the second time in a very short period of time that they announce a problem like this, and metrics are not something that they should take so lightly, they are basically the core of the social media industry, if a shadow of doubts covers their system, their credibility could drop to historic levels, and remember that we are talking about the company that started promoting it self under the motto that they would never crash or have this kind of mistakes.
Another possibility, is that this wasnt actually a mistake, and they were actually testing some changes in the algorithm, and decided to put them back because of the community reaction, if this is the case, it wouldnt be the first time, they have done similar experiments in the past, and here is the thing: in all of those cases, when they put back an update because of the community reaction, they always came back with a different version of that update, a version that would be more easily accepted by the users.
I believe Facebook is definitely trying to push us toward ads, this is no surprise, is their business model, its basically the way they monetized their services and earn money, so Im sure after this quits down, they will came back with another strategy, a less aggressive but effective one.
And lets face it, they already have a dominant position in the market, I dont think Twitter or Snapchat are a competition to them, this is basic capitalism, when you have the dominant position, you set the rules.
Here is the source of the news if you want to have a look: http://adage.com/article/digital/fac...g-real/306395/
I personally notices this drop last month, some of my pages that usually had more than 10k reach every week, suddenly dropped to 3000 or 5000 in the best cases, I tried using different kinds of content and nothing seemed to work, only videos could get a small increase.
Well, a few days ago, Facebook announce that this was actually produced by a bug, according to them, this bug generated a malfunction in the mechanism that counted reactions, comments and shares in organic posts (it didn't affect promoted posts), so because of this, the posts that were made between October 4 and October 14 were not correctly measured, apparently, the reach and the engagement was there, we just couldn't see them.
This is not the first time this happens, just a few weeks ago, Facebook also announced that a similar mistake affected the videos metrics, enlarging the number of "views".
I believe there a few points we can discuss about this new, first of all, do you think Facebook will start having some reputation problems regarding its metrics system? This is the second time in a very short period of time that they announce a problem like this, and metrics are not something that they should take so lightly, they are basically the core of the social media industry, if a shadow of doubts covers their system, their credibility could drop to historic levels, and remember that we are talking about the company that started promoting it self under the motto that they would never crash or have this kind of mistakes.
Another possibility, is that this wasnt actually a mistake, and they were actually testing some changes in the algorithm, and decided to put them back because of the community reaction, if this is the case, it wouldnt be the first time, they have done similar experiments in the past, and here is the thing: in all of those cases, when they put back an update because of the community reaction, they always came back with a different version of that update, a version that would be more easily accepted by the users.
I believe Facebook is definitely trying to push us toward ads, this is no surprise, is their business model, its basically the way they monetized their services and earn money, so Im sure after this quits down, they will came back with another strategy, a less aggressive but effective one.
And lets face it, they already have a dominant position in the market, I dont think Twitter or Snapchat are a competition to them, this is basic capitalism, when you have the dominant position, you set the rules.
Here is the source of the news if you want to have a look: http://adage.com/article/digital/fac...g-real/306395/