Facebook's News Feed Tweak to Help High Quality Publishers is Doing More Harm Than Good

In a blog post published on December 2, Facebook said it was going to start to put more articles from publishers in the News Feed, ranking them by how much your friends have been clicking on them. The idea being that Facebook would favor “high quality articles” over “the latest meme.” When I read this, I didn’t think it would have much of an impact on BestTechie, if anything, I thought it might benefit us — after all, we focus on high quality content, not memes.

Fast forward to today, you can imagine my sheer frustration every time I take a look at the reach of our Facebook posts on the BestTechie Facebook page.  To put it bluntly, the reach we’re seeing is abysmal.  Since December 2, on a good day we may have a single post hit 40 views, but most of the time our content has only been viewed by 20-someodd people.  And then there are times such as today, where one of our posts received a mere 12 views.  12 views.  Out of over the 1,000 people who “Like” our Facebook page apparently only 12 of them had our content show up in their News Feed.

Here is a screenshot of some of the recent stats from our Facebook page.

Even if you look at the numbers on a percentage basis our reach is still significantly less now than ever before. We now have just over 1,000 “Likes” and not only get less views per post but also a smaller overall percentage of our “fans” seeing our content. It’s maddening.

Here is another screenshot from stats of posts published prior to December 2 (keep in mind we also had less “Likes” at this point too).

Clearly, this update to the News Feed algorithm is hurting publishers who publish high quality content — not helping them. I find it hard to believe I’m alone with this problem. I’m not saying Facebook owes me anything, I’m glad they let me share my content on their site, but really, what’s the point of having people “Like” BestTechie on Facebook if they won’t be seeing our content there? It goes both ways, if Facebook wants me to share my content there so people use Facebook as a way to find content, then Facebook needs to work with me here.

Are you experiencing a similar problem as I am?  I’d love to hear about it.