If you’re not a blogger or small business owner, you might not be aware that Facebook has not been the friendliest place for Facebook Pages in the last 6 months. When you log in to Facebook as a user, you see many items in your Facebook “News Feed”. Some are from your Friends, some are paid advertisements, and some are from Pages you have “Like”ed. Let’s say that you’re a standard Facebook user with about 200 friends and have “Like”ed around 50-100 Pages. Maybe you log on to Facebook to check your News Feed every 3-4 hours. Think how many times your 200 friends and 100 Pages have posted Status Updates during that time. There is no way you are going to have time to see all the updates, so Facebook tries to “help” you by actually only showing a very small percentage of those updates to you in your News Feed. Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what it “thinks” you would be interested in, and hides the rest of the updates from you. As a small business or a Facebook Page, my job is to make my status updates are interesting to most of the people who have “Like”ed my Page so that my updates show up in your News Feed. Bloggers and businesses work super hard to do this. We schedule posts, we think creatively, and if you’re like me, post pictures of food and children to get you to “Like” and “Share”. The more you “Like” and “Share” an update, the more often it’s source appears in your News Feed. Or, that’s how it used to be. It used to be that all our efforts to make interesting content paid off. As a Page owner, I can see below my Status Update how many of my Fans (those who have “Like”ed my Page) saw the update. I used to get somewhere around 25%-30% of my Fans seeing my updates. That was a pretty good number although some Pages were able to reach more.

But in the last 6 months, Facebook changed the algorithm. The consensus of bloggers and small business owners is that we virtually cannot reach our Fans at all anymore. Regardless of how often you “Like” or “Share” our updates, you may never see my Page in your News Feed again. Nowadays, the same type of Status Update that reached 25%-30% of my Fans consistently reaches 10% or less. Sometimes I get the dreaded “10 people saw this post”. WhAT?! And it’s not just me. It’s everyone, including bloggers with thousands of Fans and large businesses. Facebook does have a pay-for-placement structure that allows a Page owner to pay to show up in News Feeds, but not specifically the News Feeds of those who “Like” your page — everyone’s News Feed. So you can pay for 1,000 people to see your post, but you still might not actually reach your Fans who “Like”ed your Page. You just appear in 1,000 random peoples’ News Feed. The business owners and bloggers I’ve talked to who have paid for placement say that the paid placement still doesn’t boost their numbers much above the 25%-30% they were getting before the algorithm changed. The only difference is that they’re having to pay.

If you follow me on Facebook, you might have noticed I’ve been a little slack about posting. But most likely, you haven’t noticed because you haven’t been seeing my Status Updates anyway. I wanted to let you, my awesome readers, know that I actually post a lot of personal, yoga, food, and daily things on my Instagram. I’ve been spending a lot of time over there lately because I’ve found a really neat community of yogis and fitness friends. I’m not an Instagram star or anything, but I’ve found it to be fun!

Check out some of my favorite users and posts recently:

Aren’t these so fun and inspirational?

I’ve been so much happier taking pictures and looking at positive, uplifting posts from others that challenge me than I was on Facebook battling through the clutter. I’d encourage you to give it a try, even if you don’t post pictures. Follow some inspirational people! Be encouraged!

What are your favorite Instagram accounts to follow? I’d love to hear, and I hope to see you on Instagram soon!