There's a change coming to your news feed on Facebook. Boring content will be relegated to social media purgatory. Users should be happy about this, but companies using the social network to promote their company may be seeing failure in their content marketing.

It's been a poorly kept secret that Facebook games its Edgerank algorithm to favor companies that pay to promote content, but some companies have been able to get around paying for play by swamping their feeds with a constant flow of content, that is not only self serving but boring. Now Facebook is saying if everyone is ignoring your spam, then they aren't going to let it rise in users newsfeed to any level of visibility.

That's not just true of companies, though. The biggest criticism of Facebook is that people posting pictures of what they are eating or thinking is useless. I've been seeing complaints lately of people saying they aren't seeing posts by friends and family anymore. The change in the feed is the reason. if you want to see a particular person's posts, you may actually have to go to their page on occasion and "like" some of what they are doing. Whoever and whatever you ignore on a regular basis will be relegated to the bottom of the feed. Conversely, whatever you pay attention to, comment on, share, etc. will begin to climb in your feed.

How do you get around relegation without being interesting? Pay for play, baby.

I have a company I'm working with that has decided to go a bit crazy with their promoted posts and are doing it two or three times a day. They were crowing about the reach they get until the other day I pointed out that the complaints about spam are rising and showed them how many people are starting to "unlike" their page.

Facebook, however, is not alone in this movement. Google is doing the same thing, only much more quietly, and Twitter is starting to make the same move.

So be advised: DON"T BE BORING.

If you have a problem with that, contact us.