Facebook has once again tweaked its News Feed algorithm and the change will alter how often content from brands appears in News Feeds from people that have Liked that brand’s page.  This post seems to write itself 2-3 times a year, doesn’t it?

The newest changes, which rolled out last month and were announced last November, flip the script on brands.  Previously, brands were told that they needed to add photos to their updates to increase engagement and visibility in Facebook’s News Feed.

Now?  It’s the opposite, content with photos has the lowest reach.

Yeah.  This is a big reason why I am always telling you to first plant seeds in the gardens you own.  Invest in your website and blog first, not social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.  Because those sites can change the rules on you whenever they want, and Facebook is the worst offender here.  What irks me most about this latest change is that it flies in the face of the advice that companies are hearing about social media.  Companies have been taught for years that pictures drive engagement.  That adding a relevant image to your content will enhance its value and the engagement around it.  Now, Facebook is saying that pictures are penalized, if anything.  This becomes a big problem for the companies that focus most of their social media efforts on Facebook because they will be learning what Facebook wants them to know about improving engagement on Facebook versus about what actually drives the engagement of social media content.

Facebook can be a wonderful complement to your existing online marketing efforts.  Unfortunately, many companies use its Facebook page as a replacement for having a blog or even a website.  And if they later decide to launch a blog or website, they can take the bad lessons learned on Facebook, and apply it to their blog.  Like writing posts without images.  Or only publishing ‘cute’ videos of kids falling in the snow and wondering why that’s not driving engagement on the company blog for an industrial lubricant supplier.

In a perfect world, Facebook’s goals would be aligned with your company’s goals.  Facebook would want to show and teach you how to create content that is more engaging and valuable to your customers.  But Facebook is now a publicly-traded company.  Facebook’s goals are increasing revenue and profits.  That’s likely a big reason why it’s moving toward putting more value on videos.  Because watching videos means you stay on Facebook even longer.  And as time spent on site goes up, Facebook can report that to shareholders as a sign of growth and to advertisers as leverage to raise ad rates.

Facebook’s goals are to make Facebook better for Facebook, not for your company.  Your company is on its own, so plan accordingly.

For brands that rely on using Facebook to reach customers, the hand-wringing just went up a notch.  Time and other sources have recently reported that Facebook’s plan is to restrict a brand’s ability to organically reach followers down to 1 or 2%.  That means that eventually, only 1 or 2 percent of your followers will see the average update your brand posts.

Unless…your brand agrees to pay Facebook for more exposure.  Apparently social media is free…until your company goes public and has stockholders to answer to.  It’s not a coincidence that Facebook is looking for new revenue streams now that it’s a publicly-traded company.

Newsflash: Twitter is now a publicly-traded company as well.  Don’t be surprised if the San Francisco company doesn’t also try to generate new revenue at the expense of brand activities that had previously been free.

While I have never been a huge fan of Facebook, I also recognize its right to monetize as it sees fit.  Let’s be honest: Facebook has been letting your brand effectively advertise for free for a while now.  You could argue that they have been letting you get ‘hooked’ on using its service for free and then they charge you, but its still your brand’s choice to use Facebook.  This is why I have been cautioning clients and companies for years now to not plant all their seeds in digital gardens that they do not own.  Facebook in particular has a history of changing the rules and making things more difficult for brands.  Now it is algorithm changes that affect organic reach, before that it was constantly changing rules on running contests on brand pages.

The bottom line is that you never want your brand to be in a position where all its content eggs are put in a basket that someone else owns.  If your social media efforts depend on Facebook to reach your customers, then effectively you have ceded control of said social media efforts to Facebook.

The reality is that Facebook is screwing with your ability to reach customers for free.  And that’s a good thing.  This move is going to force companies to do one of two things:

1 – Start paying for exposure on Facebook

2 – Start creating content via tools that the company controls

Many companies will go the first route.  Budgets devoted to SEO and other digital marketing channels will likely be diverted in a quest for paid Likes.

The smart companies will be the ones that invest in learning how to create and distribute content via channels that the company owns.  Guess what?  The corporate website is about to become relevant again.  The same corporate website that was bemoaned as being an archaic waste a few years ago has been seeing its own Renaissance recently.

Let’s be clear: Your website should be the central home or base of your social media efforts.  All your efforts should feed back here versus going through Facebook or Twitter.  Because while you don’t control Facebook, you do have control over your website.

I am a fan of this move because it is going to force brands to become better content creators.  It’s also going to require that brands get serious about social media: Either by paying for exposure, or by investing in learning how to create content that’s valuable enough to customers that they will seek that content out via channels that the brand owns.

For brands like Red Bull and Patagonia that have been nailing content marketing for a while now, this move won’t have a huge impact, because customers will actively seek out content from these brands.  If no one is reading your content on Facebook now, that’s not on Facebook, it’s on you.

Now’s your chance to get serious about social media and content marketing, and start seeing serious results.  Want to learn how to create effective content that gets seen by your customers? Make sure you follow this one simple rule.

Pic via Flickr user BobLinsdell