The 2017 Facebook shift that killed my local news page

I ran a small neighborhood news page in Austin from 2014 to 2019. Last month I looked back at the numbers and saw the exact drop point: March 2017, when FB changed the news feed to favor friends over pages. My post reach went from 2,000 views to about 300 in three weeks, no matter what I posted. It wasn't the content, it was the algorithm straight up deciding local updates didn't matter. Has anyone else pinned down a single update that wrecked their reach like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

evan_davis3d ago

Feel for you, man. That March 2017 switch hit a ton of local pages hard, and it was definitely the format change more than your posts. I watched a few community groups in my area go from lively to dead quiet around the same time, and it felt like nobody at the top cared about the small stuff.

abby_cooper3d ago

Same thing happened to my group, and what finally worked was cross-posting to a simple email list and telling folks that's where real updates lived. Took a while, but the regulars came back.