Excerpt:

Spring of 2012 was when bloggers, non-profits, indie bands, George Takei, community theaters, photographers, caterers, artists, mega-churches, high schools, tee-shirt vendors, campus coffee shops, art galleries, museums, charities, food trucks, and a near infinite variety of organizations; individuals from all walks of life; and businesses, both large and small, began to detect—for it was almost imperceptible at first—that the volume was getting turned down on their Facebook reach. Each post was now being seen only by a fraction of their total “fans” who would previously have seen them.

But it wasn’t just the so-called “fan pages,” individual Facebook users were also starting to notice that they weren’t seeing much in their newsfeeds anymore from the various entities they “liked”—or even updates from their closest friends and family members. Something was amiss, but unless you had a larger “data set” to look at—or a formerly thriving online business that was now getting creamed—it probably wasn’t something that you noticed or paid that much attention to.

Read the entire blog about Facebook:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friends_back.

For nonprofits, NGOs, libraries, government community programs, schools, etc. - what's your experience with this change on Facebook? Have you even noticed?

Yes, I have noticed.  The Facebook page for the Environmental Health Network has a much small "reach" and very few likes and comments as compared with last year.

Cyndi

Cyndi, you can feel free to edit your message so that "The Facebook page for the Environmental Health Network" actually links to your Facebook page! Hope that would result in more likes!

I've noticed a lot of people, including George Takei, posting to their Facebook page to remind people how to alter that settings to ensure their page always shows up in the newsfeed. Have you thought about going that route?

I have a couple of Facebook pages - and when I use Facebook as one of those pages, I read through the resulting newsfeed and trying to like various posts (sincerely - not just going through and liking randomly), and it seems to have an impact on increasing my own readership.

Other ideas? Anyone?

I didn't want to be pushy about it!  It's here and anyone is welcome to join:

www.facebook.com/EnvironmentalHealthNetwork

I'm pretty sure the meme going around to alter your settings is untrue.  Every time I've tried going to a page to change the settings, they're already set properly.

Cyndi

Yes, we have noticed less activity on the Facebook fan page for The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. We are not happy about it and we are particularly upset that this is all a setup to get us to pay to reach our very own fans.

We are planning on notifying our volunteers via our newsletter about this and instructing them as to how they can continue seeing our posts by adding our page to their "Interests List."

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will help.

If it's in your budget, I would recommend trying out promoted posts. They aren't terribly expensive (although I know that judgment is relative). You can spend as little as $5 and see results. 

Here's a guest post by GlobalGiving on Beth Kanter's blog that discusses the ins and outs of promoted posts.

Jayne - thanks for pointing out the method of asking your fans to jigger their settings. And Susan - I *love* your idea of putting the same in the newsletter. I am going to suggest we do the same at TechSoup. 

Can you give me an idea of what text to post explaining the work around? I don't want to be too wordy, but it is a multi-step process. I tried:

"Noticed less posts on your Facebook wall? Facebook has changed and isn't posting all our updates to your page. To keep RECEIVING ALL POSTS FROM the Howard County Conservancy - you have to open our page, hover the mouse over the "Like" button near the gear symbol (below our cover picture up top). In the pop-up select "ADD TO THE INTEREST LISTS".  We recommend that you follow the above instructions for ANY Facebook page you care about, so you can continue seeing all the posts from the pages you love. Thank you so much!"

Love to see what other pages have written for the instructions on how to get users to see all their posts.

Thanks!

Allison Anderson

Howard County Conservancy

Allison, I think what you have works.

We were planning on attaching some screen grabs to our copy for those who prefer visual instructions.

We have seen a huge drop in "seen by" and likes. Even though we occasionally pay to have a boost for important postings. Enough that our team recently said that if an alternative to Facebook starts up that gather's steam, we'll hop on that bandwagon instead because we feel Facebook has hijacked our communication for the sake of more monetizing.