Monday Buzz: Facebook Cracks Down on Promotional Posts

Facebook often alters the algorithms fueling its news feeds, much to the chagrin of those whose pages see noticeably less traffic afterward. And the social networking giant’s latest announcement is bound to frustrate a whole new batch of organizations.

The aim of the upcoming update, which is planned to go live in January, is to reduce promotional content that appears in news feeds and increase content from friends and pages users are actually interested in. Facebook’s announcement  (opens in a new tab) outlined three traits shared by content it deems “too promotional”:

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

“While pages that post a lot of the content we mention above will see a significant decrease in distribution, the majority of pages will not be impacted by this change,” Facebook claimed in its announcement  (opens in a new tab). Nonetheless, it’s another change that association social media teams should prepare for as the new year approaches.

Feel-Good Story of the Day

The National Conference Center and events center West Belmont Place hosted a different kind of event earlier this month, when a rescued bald eagle was returned to the wild  (opens in a new tab) after being nursed back to health by the Blue Ridge Wildlife Center.

“When we learned that Blue Ridge Wildlife was looking for a location to release their eagle, we immediately volunteered. With our close proximity to both the Potomac River and the location where the eagle was found, our site was an ideal location for the release,” Geoff Lawson, NCC and West Belmont Place vice president and general manager, said in a statement.

Other Good Reads

Facebook may be bringing the hammer down on promotions, but association management expert Steve Drake has three useful tips  (opens in a new tab) for how to make the most of your promotional messaging.

Intimidated by the complexities of government grant applications? Alison Teitelbaum, a senior associate at associations management company Coulter, aims to remove the mystique from the application process in this new blog post  (opens in a new tab).

“Podcasts in 2010 were a lot like podcasts in 2007, which were a lot like podcasts in 2004, which are a lot like podcasts in 2014,” podcaster and programmer Marco Arment writes  (opens in a new tab) in a post refuting the much-hyped podcast “renaissance.”  (opens in a new tab)

(Facebook)