An upcoming change to how Facebook manages its news feed will have a big impact on photographers who use business pages to share their content with followers and clients.
In a January 11, 2018 post to his personal account, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other,” He went on to say, “you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”
What does this mean if you run a photography page on Facebook? Well it likely will not be good. Photographers who use pages to share photos and videos with their followers will likely see less engagement in the coming weeks and months. The changes to the algorithm Facebook uses to disseminate content to its users will allow fewer photos and videos from photographers’ commercial pages from being seen on followers’ feeds.
Sources with ties to Facebook told me recently that unless your spending hundreds or thousands of dollars in advertising per month to promote your page, your commercial page will “likely die a slow death.”
Follower engagement on my Facebook page over the past 12 months, has actually rose as did the total number of followers. It will be interesting to see how this trend evolves as the new algorithms begin to take hold. While the algorithms will have an impact on my photography page and others it’s important to note that uploading good and engaging content to your page should keep followers coming back even though the algorithm will make that more difficult.
Bottom line this change will be a positive for consumers of content from family and friends and a negative for small businesses and creators such as musicians, artists, and photographers.
A trend that I’ve seen in the works for a while now will be accelerated by this algorithm change. Facebook will continue to step away from its role as a publisher and disseminator of news while Twitter will fully cement that area. Facebook will be the place to connect with family and friends while Twitter will be where you get news, information, and/or publish news, media, and commercial content.
I will continue to upload my photography images to my Facebook page. If you don’t want to miss any of my photos then be sure to follow my other social media sources. I’m on Twitter, Instagram, 500px, and Fine Arts America.
© Willard Sharp
