Depending on how you look at it of course, you might see Facebook’s recent updates which suppress page posts appearing in user’s news feeds as a nail in the coffin. But, as with everything, if you view it in a negative way, it will only ever yield you negative results.

First of all we’ll try to give you an understanding of how Facebook currently decides what to show users on their news feeds – bear with us it is a little complicated but we’re going to try and simplify it a bit.

There will soon be a Facebook publication of their “News Feed Values” which goes some way to explain how it decides what shows up, when and where. The key thing here (exactly as when thinking about how to rank your site on Google) is to remember who the core valued customer of Facebook is – everyday users! Not your company, not Marks and Spencer not The Huffington Post – you, the end user.

They have to look after that user. If they allowed every business to force their content into everyone’s faces, then they’d start leaking users and they’d struggle to get them back. This is a balance they are constantly striving to keep. They got close to a major user exodus in 2010 when games and game requests (you remember the vastly irritating FarmVille notifications) started to drive users away. They responded to this vigorously and made sweeping changes to the news feed to drastically reduce the visibility of games – you want them now, they’re still there, you’ve just got to go find them.

So they use what they call a “Value System” and top of the pile there is Friends and Family – what Facebook began being about and what it wants to remain being about. It is important to remember that Facebook has over 1.5 billion users, each user has their own news feed which is unique to them, they’ll follow pages and have upwards of 200 friends – it would be impossible for them to see EVERYTHING that is posted which could cross their feed.

This image is a rough guide, a basic idea of how value is attributed to content and therefore how it’s importance is decided for adding into a users news feed. Please take note that it is a rough guide and not in any way are we able to tell you 100% what Facebook uses to determine value. Facebook uses some basic principles to decide how to quantify the values above, what counts as “interesting” for example.

A recent interview with a Facebook news feed spokesperson recently revealed the following:

Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family. That is still the driving principle of news feeds today. Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook. That’s why if it’s from your friends, it’s in your feed, period — you just have to scroll down. To help make sure you don’t miss the friends and family posts you are likely to care about, we put those posts toward the top of your news feed. We learn from you and adapt over time. For example, if you tend to like photos from your sister, we’ll start putting her posts closer to the top of your feed so you won’t miss what she posted while you were away.

Our research has also shown us that, after friends and family, people have two other strong expectations when they come to news feed:

• Your feed should inform. People expect the stories in their feed to be meaningful to them — and we have learned over time that people value stories that they consider informative. Something that one person finds informative or interesting may be different from what another person finds informative or interesting — this could be a post about a current event, a story about your favourite celebrity, a piece of local news, or a recipe. We’re always working to better understand what is interesting and informative to you personally, so those stories appear higher up in your feed.
• Your feed should entertain. We’ve also found that people enjoy their feeds as a source of entertainment. For some people, that’s following a celebrity or athlete; for others, it’s watching live videos and sharing funny photos with their friends. We work hard to try to understand and predict what posts on Facebook you find entertaining to make sure you don’t miss out on those.

So what does all that mean?

The clear subtext within that is this: Facebook places the benefit of its users over and above that of publishers, developers, pages, advertisers and so on. They even seem to be saying that place that over their own monetisation – but they’re at a point where they can afford to do so, they’re so big that people will still keep coming and still keep paying them – because they’re too big to be ignored. Facebook knows that if they don’t prioritise their users, they won’t keep coming back – and that would be the true death of the platform, if users dwindle as will the number of publishers and advertisers who use the platform because their returns will fall alongside user numbers.

So how do you overcome this? How do you, knowing that your page is not important to Facebook and that they’ll actively reduce your reach as more and more users and advertisers and publishers use the platform, make sure your page and your content is seen?

As with all of these things there is no right or wrong answer or a silver bullet to solve all your problems. But, we can give you some tips on how to make sure that your page is at least nudging above your competition.

1. Pay for reach

Yes Facebook has paid advertising (unless you’ve barely used it you probably couldn’t miss it) and you can promote the content on your page to a wider audience. The major advantage that Facebook (and other social media marketing) has over say Google Pay Per Click is simple – you can target your audience very specifically on Facebook.

How? Well, because Facebook gathers so much information on it’s users it can use that to sell more effective advertising. So when you boost your page, your website, your post etc you can target it by gender, age range, region, nationality, interests and so much more! This allows you to really tailor down your target audience and make sure that the people who see your ad are that much more likely to find it of interest.

You’d be surprised how little this could cost you too!

2. Make it interesting!

You are reading this blog because it interests you. Because you want to know the answer to a question you might not otherwise have known. If you came to it via our social media you saw the title, thought “yes I want to know that” and clicked. So when you’re posting content yourself make sure you make it interesting, attention grabbing, eye catching! Use a nice picture, we used this one of the people because it catches the eye.

Make sure your content is actually going to make someone pay even the tiniest bit of attention to it. If it is boring, run of the mill or poorly presented when posted onto social media, you’re hamstringing yourself before you’ve got going.

3. Think outside the box

Sounds very cliché we know, but you need to make yourself more interesting (as per our point above) than the other plethora of content being dumped onto Facebook minute by minute. So you have to think of ways to make it more engaging. One method quite effectively used is to get other users to spread it for you. Remember, if an individual user shares it, it counts as “friends and family” for the news feeds of all their connections! Meaning you’re appearing higher!

How do you get users to share your content and spread it for you? Well, again there are lots of ways to do it, an effective and regularly used method is a social media competition. Ask users to like and share your post/page in order to submit themselves as an entry into your competition – each share pushes your content on to more and more people. Obviously, you can’t do this for every post you ever put up, but it is an effective and usually low cost (depending on the value of the prize you’re offering) way, to boost your page exposure!

There are of course many other ways and many other things that could work for you and help you gain followers and returns from your Facebook page. Even though you’ve probably seen it’s effectiveness dip in recent months, you can still use it to very good effect.