The organic reach of content published on Facebook will take another hit this week as the platform rolls out a new update that will only keep track of viewable impressions for Page posts.
In a company blog post on Friday, Facebook said organic reach impressions will now only begin ticking over when a Page post can be seen on a user’s screen. The new methodology mirrors its implementation for ads and will lead to “lower reach figures than before” due to stricter reporting.
It is less than a month since Facebook announced major changes to its News Feed algorithm, which now serves up more personal content from friends and family and fewer posts from businesses, brands and media.
It has been almost 18 months since Facebook said it would adopt viewable-only counts. Back in November 2016, the social giant was amidst a series of measurement faux pas, which kick-started the now ongoing conversation about the reliability of metrics and transparency across social sites.
Facebook admitted that the delay was due to the fact that it took longer than was initially planned to build the new system, but it is now ready to be rolled out to the masses. To ease marketers in to the new concept and enable them to compare and contrast post performance, Facebook will report both the old and new versions of organic reach for the time being. It will then move to a viewable-only count in the future.
Facebook also revealed late last week that it would begin testing a downvoting option for public page posts with a small number of English-speaking Android users.
