It seemed like it was coming for a long time, but it appears the days of free Facebook marketing are behind us. Last week it appears that Facebook made a change so that albums made by business pages no longer appear in the news feeds of their fans. This has happened before, but never lasted longer than a few hours/days. It seems that the change might be permanent and that that avenue is closed.

Does this change affect your business?
How do you plan to combat it?

WTF... serious? This totally changes the value of FB as the viral component is completely crippled. Is there an option to pay for this? Not saying it would be worth it but most of our traffic comes from FB referrals.

May be time to reinvest in SEO, I have been slowly changing into a more hands on brand anyway, sometimes I feel like the younger FB crowd doesn't value the connection with real products.

Yes, you can pay to promote each post you make, but it appears (unless it's a week-long glitch) that FB won't share your albums with your fans anymore... or that it will be on a very limited basis.

Won't bother me. I don't use FB to promote myself much.

I think I noticed it the same day you did, Tony. I posted just minutes after you that day, saw your post about the "technical difficulties", and wondered what was going on. I've started posting teasers to my personal timeline and sharing links from the business page. That's about the only way to do it. It sucks that the album is no longer shown.

Not sure if I'm seeing an impact. I'm just posting more from multiple pages.

I guess they are just trying to get that $7 out of us.

so if you just post one teaser image it will show up in feeds? does this only affect albums?

No wonder my last album upload only reached 40 people.

I get most of my hits on FB from tagging clients. As log as that still stands, I'll be alright.

I think most small business are better off running from a personal feed, although probably not allowed in T&C's.
FB and Big G are doing they're best to turn everyone to Ad's, revenue. Me thinks I'd be better off pounding pavement with a sign board. Next year all resources will go to Wedding Fayre's meet people in the flesh as in the past. The virtual meeting ground for new clients is currently a mess for small business.

TomHarmon wrote:
I get most of my hits on FB from tagging clients. As log as that still stands, I'll be alright.

Same for me, Tom...tagging is always what I am banking on.

I'm with the tagging crew. If I don't tag someone in my album/images, I see hardly any traffic. But if I can get the mom, dad, bride, groom, etc. tagged in the images, I see 10x as much traffic.

Also Facebook's value is built on marketing and information. Their huge 1/2 billion user base (or more by now) means that Facebook can't entirely just do what they want. So they can't just keep selling user information or "leaking" it for marketing purposes. But they can charge businesses. And then drive them to Google+ or other modes of marketing. Because the value in Facebook is the free aspect or viral media.

Facebook needs to wake up and realize that their value really, truly doesn't exist. They sell nothing. They have nothing of value that they can actually do anything with.

Yup... tagging. I never post blog link. I always post at least one awesome pic with tag and the link to the blog as description. If you are not friends with the clients, just ask them to tag them self.

Tagging. A tag means you've actually been patronized, not just "Liked."

For those of you tagging, I think that might not work as well as it had previously based upon my tests last week. I uploaded a wedding and tagged the B&G in every photo. After nearly an hour the album had 2 views. Typically I have nearly 3-4k in that time.

Goes to show you that you can't rely on some other platform to do the marketing for you. Audience building ought to be done on a platform that you own completely.

- trr

so this is only for images, o also apply to post?

Tony Hoffer wrote:
For those of you tagging, I think that might not work as well as it had previously based upon my tests last week. I uploaded a wedding and tagged the B&G in every photo. After nearly an hour the album had 2 views. Typically I have nearly 3-4k in that time.

Well, Im still experimenting with paid advertising with Facebook. I promote each wedding as well as tag my clients. The last wedding I posted, which was when Facebook shut the album thing down, I got very little looks from my current fans, but according to my insights, 4,000+ people saw that post, which is the highest I've ever had. So 10 bucks to promote each post aint bad in my opinion.

I'm glad you brought this up. I hadn't looked at the last album I posted..but I just did and it has all of 13 views.

Wow.

Prettym1k3 wrote:
Their huge 1/2 billion user base (or more by now) means that Facebook can't entirely just do what they want.

Just saw on the news yesterday that Facebook hit 1 Billion users. This morning I read that FB admits to collecting data/ keywords from private messages. The time is ripe for someone to create a new social media outlet.

As a "liker" of a few wedding photographers on FB, this makes sense why I haven't seen anything new in the last week.

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-changed-edgerank-algorithm-to-hurt-advertisers-2012-10