Facebook appears to have removed Page updates from the streaming ticker on the right portion of the screen. No official announcement has been made yet, however, its been days since I’ve seen any updates from any pages I follow. This means that even if a user is subscribed to receive notifications from a page and constantly engages with their updates, they still will not see their posts within the streaming ticker, which solely consists of updates from your friends now.
This should prove to be very worrisome for businesses on Facebook who can expect to see less engagement now that their posts aren’t viewable in the ticker anymore. Basically there are two places for users to discover content on Facebook, via the News Feed and streaming ticker. As you can see in the example screenshot below, after posting to our DashBurst page on Facebook, the update triggers a notification and is shown in the News Feed, but not the ticker anymore. What makes the ticker such a great place for people to discover new content is that it’s visible no matter where you are on Facebook, the News Feed, your own timeline or other pages. Not everyone has the streaming Twitter-like ticker enabled though because their screen resolution may be too small or they are just annoyed by real-time updates. No matter what though, this is bad news for page managers who can expect to see even less fan engagement going forward. Our initial data shows a 66% reduction in post interaction since the changes took place several days ago! Could this be a ploy to force businesses to spend more on paid promotions or just a bug?
Have you seen any updates from pages you follow in the ticker recently? And have you noticed less engagement with your pages accordingly?
This is why you don’t let engineers run a social network. They need to make pages more visible so they can grow and as they grow they will spend money on advertising. Facebook does have cheapest advertising available and basically a captive audience.
You’re right John it seems like every change made by Facebook hurts business pages more and more!
I miss the old days when they had the drop down tab on home page so we could go to what we wanted to see. It was nice to go check just statuses, photos, pages, games now it is just a mess.
I have seen several folks asking about this. I guess that FB will have to respond…it will be interesting to hear their answer.
For sure Harold, I’d like to hear official word from them given such a drastic change…
I don’t think FB has ever responded to anything they’ve ever done, have they? That’s kind of their Standard Operating Procedure. 😀 It’s very annoying to users, but they don’t seem to give a hoot. I’ve said it before, and I”ll say it again: Zuck’s ego will eventually be the downfall of FB. Everyone thought Myspace would be around forever, too. o.O
This is a very frustrating change, indeed. We’ve seen a similar drop off in traffic. Quality posts that would have drawn hundreds of likes are now drawing maybe 150. Yet, I don’t like paying for posts that are meant to drive engagement not business. I have a feeling most businesses are in that camp, which means we will likely be seeing a lot more paid-for business and a lot less that are purely for audience enjoyment.