Afternoon All,
Hope everyone is doing good …. This blog post has taken me a week or so to get around too, due to life and work being CRAZY busy 
Following on from my previous blog post, I did say this one was going to talk *maybe RANT* about photos / images and pictures no longer being the most powerful thing you can share on Facebook.
I stand by this statement – I don’t expect you all to agree with me BUT this blog post today is my reasoning for standing by it.
Firstly let me say, I am dissapointed that photos seem to have lost their ‘weight’ – because, for most of us they are still the BEST way of sharing information – and yes they can still have maximum engagement levels but you have to be prepared to part with $$ for that to happen now.
There are a LOT of social media gurus out there who rely heavily on images with their Facebook fan pages and have noticed a dramatic change in the engagement / interaction against them , so its clear its not just me who’s noticed the differences.
Photos drove engagement and had a much higher reach with users, because of their ability to jump out in a newsfeed, and images that really resonated with people – you just want to comment, and share with friends. You scan your newsfeed and pictures just stand out, to know if you ‘liked’ it, you just looked at it. Not a lot to take in or think about – like with the text rich updates.
A Picture Paints A Thousand Words …… or at least it did 
Looking at page insights, there is NO doubt in my mind, organically the reach has dropped, thus affecting the engagement levels (because they are just not appearing in front of the audience like they used too)
Now, I don’t EXACTLY know why this has happened at Facebook, but what I do know is that we have all OVER used the photo sharing idea to the point of it almost becoming annoying.
I don’t think this is anyone’s fault per say, as all the experts and gurus out there *even myself here* have told people that using images is a great way of driving engagment because they are the no1 shared thing on Social Media – and in the general umbrella of Social Media that is still true. For Facebook, it most certainly is not.
The thing is, I don’t think people quite ‘get’ that adding a photo to every single update just because you know it is good for Edgerank isn’t HOW its done. When the ‘experts’ share this information it is all relative. If a post is bettered by including a image or using an image with text in, then use them. But NOT JUST FOR THE SAKE OF IT.
Newsfeeds on Facebook (certainly mine) is saturated with pages that I’ve liked / connected with uploading non relevant photos attached to text to maximise their reach. This just makes me switch off, and I will be completely honest here: Those repeat offenders have been ‘hidden’ from my newsfeed.
We are the victims of our success – We have over cooked this one, like a dog with a bone we’ve not let go. And now we’ve killed it for ourselves. There are SO many of us who can’t afford or don’t want to pay Facebook for the privilege of promoting our posts, yet instead of slowly slowly catchy monkey and worked hard at building a following with a great variety of content, we’ve just listened to all the experts around us and gone full steam ahead with photo post overload.
You may disagree with me, but if you look at it objectively this is EXACTLY what we’ve done, and now we’re paying the price for it. I see SO many people complaining about
Does anyone else do this or is it just a Clair thing *switch off i mean / hide updates*
I do know one thing about the recent changes at Facebook with the Edgerank parameter change, and that is the ‘Negative Feedback’ has a much heavier weight than ever before.
This means, as a Facebook page, negative feedback on your content can effectively destroy your post’s reach.
Facebook has said that they are doing this to try and combat spammy pages. But as more and more businesses get on Facebook and post more often, this effectively raises the Facebook content quality bar for all pages.
So you might be thinking, what is negative feedback and how can it be avoided?
- Hide (Hide this story)
- Hide All (Hide all stories from a Page)
- Report Spam
- Unlike Page
Very true, yes we have all over done it. Myself included but I like to think I didn’t go to overboard, I see people posting pictures of cute cats and dogs on a daily basis when they are supposed to be teaching social media or blogging. It is crazy, by all means throw some stuff in the mix but it got so bad that folks were posting any old image just to be seen.
Which resulted in people hiding the pages from the feed which unfortunately as you say affects the pages edgeranking very badly indeed. Nice of Facebook to tell us this, surely hide should just be classed as a persons individual decision and should not affect the page.
Time to mix the posts up with some fun images but mainly useful stuff like videos and text, I guess the old saying goes ‘If you have nothing good to say, then say nothing’