Facebook will start to reduce promotional Page posts next year

Facebook is messing with its News Feed again, but this time for the better: It will start reducing “overly promotional Page posts” from your News Feed next year, the company says.

Facebook has been surveying its users for feedback, and says that users have consistently expressed they’d like to see less of certain kinds of posts:

1. Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
2. Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
3. Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

Above: Example of an “overly promotional Page post”

Image Credit: Screen shot

What’s interesting here is that while Facebook has been closely monitoring the ads in people’s News Feed, it hasn’t been doing so with posts from brands and Pages that are promotional in content, until now, that is.

“Now we’re bringing new volume and content controls for promotional posts, so people see more of what they want from Pages,” Facebook says.

But despite the reduction in this type of unpaid content from pages and brands, this won’t mean fewer or more ads, or even any changes on that side of News Feed content, the company says. It seems that Facebook just wants to make sure that content from Pages is just as well designed, relevant, and “pleasant” (as much as brand content can be) to users as ads are (or are trying to be, at least).

Nevertheless, this is likely concerning to a lot of marketers. Facebook is essentially telling them that they have to be subtle and pleasing all the time. Being bold and asking for installs and other actions, or just plain “working the system” is not okay anymore.

So marketers and advertisers just might turn to ads in order to get that explicitly promotional content in front of eyeballs.