Facebook’s News Feed Bombshell Shouldn’t Have Caught Anyone Off Guard

Organic reach has been on its way down for years

If Facebook’s announcement last Thursday that its News Feed algorithm was being altered to favor posts from friends and family over those from publishers and pages came as a surprise to anyone, it probably shouldn’t have.

A source at the social network even said, “We’ve been openly discussing the decline in organic reach for a long time—almost four years. I know it’s still surprising to many, but it certainly wasn’t a secret.”

It seems as if page administrators—for both brands and media companies—have been complaining about declining organic reach since Facebook introduced pages in November 2007, and those complaints only got louder as time wore on and Facebook continued to tweak what its users saw.

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