Last week, Facebook announced (albeit quietly) that this coming March, they would be changing their strategy of what their personal profile users see in their newsfeeds.

Facebook is a complicated social network with complicated algorithms and those complicated algorithms rarely make any sense to social media marketers; let alone general business page owners.

Here is the biggest takeaway from last week’s announcement: inactive Facebook pages themselves will likely disappear altogether; pages with little activity and engagement will suffer in that their audience will start to be cut as well as seeing their posts disappear.

The impact will vary from business to business depending on a number of factors including the type (mixture) of content and how their audience interacts with that content. Businesses that post on Facebook for the sake of posting on Facebook or businesses that post on Facebook who continuously promote themselves, their products, and services will likely see the biggest decreases in content distribution to their audience share.

As we mentioned earlier, Facebook uses complicated algorithms to determine who will see your posts. Going back to 2014, Facebook began the process of penalizing business pages that were overly-promoting their business and not providing their audience with the information, education, and entertainment they are coming for the Internet, to begin with.

Zuckerberg; in a subsequent post, stated again that that research indicates people want to see posts on social media related to what they care about and his recent announcement moves Facebook closer to the objective they laid out in 2014.

Social media is a highly dynamic communication tool but this recent announcement by Facebook isn’t likely to have much of an impact on small to mid-size businesses; unless your small to mid-size business profiles consist of an audience who never likes, comments, clicks, or shares your content. Likely they would never purchase your products or services anyways.

Bottom line here is the impact of the steps taken by Facebook in their recent announcement further “cleans up” the social media accounts that are poorly managed, inactive, overly-promoting in their content approach or those businesses who have purchased “likes” where those (most likely) abandoned Facebook profiles.

Keep an eye on the reach and engagement of your content – they will be the true test and will continue to let you know if you are achieving your social media strategies.