As if things weren’t bad enough on Facebook already, CEO Mark Zuckerburg has gone ahead and put the final nail in the coffin for many struggling artists and Facebook page owners around the globe.

On Friday he announced a new change in Facebook’s algorithm:

…you’ll see less public content like corporate, brand, and media messages. And the public content you see more and more will be kept to the same standard – it should encourage meaningful interactions between people. – Mark Zuckerberg.

So from now on, brand and media publications will be less visible in Facebook’s news feed. Just like that! THANKS A LOT FOR THE WARNING MARK!!!!

So what does this mean for Facebook page owners?

In his speech, he gave clues that he’s going to reward pages that live stream:

There are many tight-knit communities around TV shows and sports teams. We’ve seen people interact way more around live videos than regular ones. Some news helps start conversations on important issues. But too often today, watching video, reading news or getting a page update is just a passive experience.

So in a nutshell, Zuckerberg is saying Facebook is looking promote content that both engages people, brings them together and keeps them on Facebook…

…but then goes on to give us some bullshit reason as to the ‘real’ reason behind the changes:

We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being. So we’ve studied this trend carefully by looking at the academic research and doing our own research with leading experts at universities.

The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good.

Drop all the do good bullshit already! Let’s make one thing clear; Facebook is deliverable to it’s share holders and only cares about it’s bottom line. It’s only taking steps to increase it’s revenues, not to reduce them! So you can rest assured these moves aren’t solely aimed at making us happier!

What Zuckerberg meant to say is news content (hosted on other websites) is taking people away from our platform and there now are too many videos in people’s newsfeeds, so they’re not keeping people as engaged as they used to.

So that’s why Facebook is now trying to push pages towards sharing live streamed content, as apparently we’re all hooked on that shit bro.

Pay to Play

By further capping post reach, Zuckerberg’s hoping page owners will finally get the message that Facebook is now a pay to play service. And that’s a huge kick in the teeth to artists who have spent years accruing thousands of likes. As they’ll need to dig deeper to be in with a chance of reaching them from now on. Or they’ll have to improvise and start live streaming their status updates instead!

Why not create a page group?

Zuckerberg is advising pages to create groups if they want to get more post reach (within their existing communities), but as far as pure viral discovery goes, you’ll need to start digging deep if you want to reach new audiences.

Ask all your followers to do this

Facebook still allows you to control some of what you see in your news feed, so ask your fans to start subscribing to receive your posts first – before they do away with this option as well!

Post More Often

Zuckerberg confirms Facebook won’t restrict post reach if you post more often. So maybe consider treating similar to Twitter and start sharing more status updates from now on?