Finally. Here’s some good news if you look after a Facebook page.
Content from pages is being seen again in people’s timelines.
But before you start celebrating and dusting off the 2010-era comms plan, links haven’t come back and I really don’t think they ever will. Yes, I know your web team like them but they don’t run Facebook. The last time driving traffic to the website was a winning strategy Donald Trump was just a reality TV star.
Stick with me, this is a story told over three charts from Meta’s Transparency Centre.
How things were
The first chart is from 2021 and shows 14 per cent of people’s Facebook timelines coming from pages. A meagre 6.6 per cent of this have come from posts with a link. Almost a fifth of all content came from Facebook groups.
How things got
This is the chart that led to dry mouths and rising panic. In early 2024, Facebook page content in timeline has literally disappeared. It didn’t matter if you had a link or not it was 0.0 per cent of people’s timelines were from a page. Unless you were paying people were not seeing your content.
Facebook group content was staying buoyant.
The other change was what is classed as ‘unconnected posts’. This is content served-up by Facebook’s AI-powered ‘discovery engine’ which seeks to put content in front of you that it think you’ll like.
To illustrate this, one night I was on Facebook discussing Brunton Park, home of Carlisle United, with my brother. A few hours later, I was served content from a group I wasn’t in showing how Bruntomn Park looked in the 1980s. Niche. But it chimed with the niche chat I was having. Posts like these attuned to users’ discussions rose to just over a quarter of everything that was seen.
How things are now
Right now, the numbers have returned slightly for Facebook pages. Just over 11 per cent of content is from pages but less than one per cent of it contains links. Interestingly, this link penalising is replicated with Facebook groups you’ve joined as well as unconnected posts. The moral of the story is that links remain algorithmic poison.
The unconnected posts numbers remain really strong at just over a third.
What’s the message?
Overall, keep away from links but there’s also potentially mileage in posting content that people may be talking about or may be interested in. So, maybe content directly about what to do to keep children busy in the holidays may be a strategy to double down on.
Facebook groups have never gone away.
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Creative commons credit: Waterloo Station, 1984 by Ben Brooksbank.
