By We make no secret here of running various test pages on the Facebook platform and have for years now. Some of these Pages used to generate our agency large revenue figures and have grown quite large in follower counts over the years as our various organic marketing tests have proven effective. But, now one of the single most effective organic marketing tools on Facebook – what we call The Facebook Machine – is in deep jeopardy of no longer working and it all comes down to what appears to be a relatively new automated system that is flagging harmless memes as “broadly disliked”.
Watch the YouTube Video on this Topic:
When this first hit our page last month organic post reach started to plummet dropping from somewhere in the 2,000 to 250,000 range to below 1,000. There was no notification for these issues, no warning, no message in our Business Manager / Meta Business Suite, no email, nothing. Just one day after years of effort we’re considered amazing and our followers see our content and the next day almost none of them are seeing anything. Drops like this are actually not uncommon and we’ve been hit by cycles of them. The way Facebook works is that once your content starts going viral it kind of keeps going until people who actually don’t really care about your core content are getting reached by one singular piece of content, then Facebook decides these new engagers who will be unlikely to enjoy anything else you ever post again are who should see your newest content, reach starts to collapse, and many Pages lose faith and give up. This is where our process comes in, by boosting content to our desired audience we help realign the algorithm after a viral event ensuring our core audience is always seeing what we produce and generating an almost sine wave like progression of reach from viral crests to anti-viral troughs. Lately though this process has seemed broken at times, no matter how much money we spend to reach a core audience or an already subscribed audience, they almost never see the next post we make.
The Meme Banned by Facebook’s AI System:
Organic reach on Facebook is already nightmarish for everyone except massive pages, TikTokers moving over with new accounts, and those annoying pages that make hatebait videos. Last year we were driving hundreds of thousands of engagements for many of our viral memes, now with this new AI generated demotion based on a false-positive we’re lucky to get over 100 reactions organically and the boosting portion of our process isn’t working like it used to.
Worse, once notified about it Meta’s staff tells you they can do nothing and that you need to delete the content that was falsely flagged by this automated system. Meta didn’t have human customer service forever, now that they do they are almost completely powerless to recognize issues and fix them or escalate them to a more specialized team that could.
Simply put. Facebook’s algorithm is horribly broken.
Your followers are seeing less and less of your content, and Meta’s recently introduced a new AI system that makes this even worse. The new system appears to flag content like a meme about barbecue as “sensitive content” or some other awful offense to Facebook’s platform and then warns admins to take it down or else they’ll lose reach of future posts to their audience.
Note: I would share a screenshot here of our “Insights” but Facebook has made it impossible to separate boosted reach + engagements from organic now in the new view and considering we boost nearly everything this skews the data a lot.
The end result is 0.30% of your core audience getting reached and your IG page which has only 2.47% of your following driving much higher engagements, no matter what you do.
Worse yet, other Pages and even Groups on the platform are incentivized by Facebook to ‘steal’ this content (most memes are covered under Fair Use) and post it to on their own, frequently driving much higher engagements and one Page even told us that Facebook paid them $40,000 to take one of our memes via the Performance Bonus Program.
On Facebook there is a misalignment of incentives. Facebook appears to want your content and recommends it clear up until the point when someone newer comes along and steals it then simply rotates your reach to them and the cycle goes on and on and on and on ad nauseum. Your original content is not valued, AI systems are unleased to take what little reach you have left, and you are stuck on the platform posting over and over again because Facebook and Instagram are two of the largest social platforms available to you.
This issue may also be impacting Meta / Facebook Ad accounts and of course Groups which frequently rely on memes as a way of driving engagements. We have seen a slew of removals in these areas with no explanation and assume it is the same or similar AI system falsely demanding a piece of content is sensitive or violating some rule when it is not.
You can see if your Facebook page has any content restrictions you haven’t been told about, especially if you’ve been seeing lower than usual reach or engagements by going to this URL when logged in as the Page: https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=profile_recommendations&show_recommendable_nux=0&referrer=prodash_home
Closing update: Boosting is actually working, but at lower than expected improvement figures. Our posts have gone from under 1,000 reach (to our fans) in the first 24-hours organically to between 5,000 and 8,000 since we started boosting some of the lower performing posts including the 2 Facebook originally flagged. It hasn’t been cheap though, spending upwards of $25 / post to our desired audience and core audience. After the holidays we plan on boosting those 2 posts again with even more $$ to see if this helps reset the system completely.