14 DAY TRIAL // Over the weekend, Facebook got criticized over an apparent drop in engagement for popular users, this after it introduced the option to pay to promote posts. Plenty were suggesting foul play and it isn't the first time.
But Facebook has now responded to say that it does not artificially drive down engagement just so it can sell more promoted posts and that doing so would be detrimental to Facebook.
The company does explain though that it can't possibly show all updates to all the people and that it must employ a ranking algorithm which means there will be losers.
Overall though, it's actually seeing an increase in engagement for people with a lot of subscribers/followers.
"There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true," Facebook flat out denied any possibility of it messing with the organic ranking algorithm to favor paid posts.
"First, in aggregate, engagement – likes, comments, shares – has gone up for most people who have turned the Follow feature on. In fact, overall engagement on posts from people with followers has gone up 34% year over year," Facebook explained.
Facebook adds that there are plenty of data points considered when determining what to show in the news feed. However, the fact that a post is paid or not isn't one of them, sponsored posts don't replace the "most engaging posts" the company claims.
Facebook offers a possible explanation for the drop in engagement seen by some early adopters of the Follow feature; it believes that engagement has naturally dropped as people were interested in seeing how the feature works when it first landed, but later their interest waned.
Of course, Facebook has also done plenty of changes to the news feed, to the way it ranks stories, to how paid posts are treated and so on in the past year and will do more going forward. Any of them is going to have an impact.