I’ve read recently FB will be limiting the audience of professional Page posts, ie, showing them to only 16% of fans.
That means pros will HAVE to invest in ads ( social ads generally) on Facebook or sponsored stories to get their content seen.
They’re to be called " Premium ads" it seems but I havent seen this in place yet as a page manager in France. Have you?
I also havent been able to figure out how to sponsor a story on Facebook so it appears on fans’ wall rather than as an ad on the side.
The only way I’ve seen a post appear on fans’ wall is to buy a sponsored story containing a reaction to one of the page’s posts.
Facebook has always limited the exposure of posts by brands (and to some degree individuals) based on the EdgeRank system and aside from very small pages, the rates tend to be pretty low as let’s face it, over time people just get less interested in what you have to say.
Thus we get to Promoted Posts which let you up the exposure level. This isn’t something you need to use on every post, in fact I’d say the effects will be fairly counter to do that (there’s a reason why your exposure drops) but for the right announcement, question or share it’s very compelling.
Of course if there’s a move to hard cap visibility away from engagement / relevancy that would be a big change. Don’t suppose you remember where you saw that info?
From everything I’ve read the 16% is not a cap but rather the average exposure posts by brand pages currently get (showing just how important edgerank is).