Facebook is forcing marketers to become better people – and we love it.

Facebook is rolling out changes to their algorithms when it comes to organic content posted by brands.

Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.

What does this mean to brands?

What this means, is that Facebook is no longer accepting content that is promotional in it’s tone or style for free. However, these changes won’t affect the number of ads users see in their newsfeed. But it will be increasingly hard to push promotional content organically. We read this change as an attempt to keep ad-style content separated from organic content. We are moving from encouraging brands to gather “Likes”, to posting organic content that really appeals to your audience. If you want to build an audience – you can. But it doesn’t mean that you can share promotional content for free.

Marketing has never been free

Marketing, advertising, and reaching an audience has never been free. Nor will it ever be. As a company, Facebook has seen the potential of advertising income. With an income of $3,6B in Q4 2014, we see that more and more brands are spending money on reaching people. While brands use of the platform is evolving, Facebook is taking great measures to protect their users from overly promotional content. As we have stated in another blogpost about their actions against like-gating, marketers are being forced into becoming better content managers.

So, no. Doomsday is not upon us. This is a natural step in Facebook’s way of growing up. The social network is in it’s early teens – and is starting to behave as an adult. It’s time for us to start treating it as one too.

Advertising on Facebook doesn’t have to be expensive and complicated. Here’s a handful blogposts we’ve written about Facebook ads:

4 Things To Do To Improve Your Facebook Ads

How to get started with advertising on Facebook

Bidding – what you need to know about bidding for Facebook Ads