Facebook just gutted organic reach for brand pages and everyone is acting like the sky is falling. I'm not unsympathetic, but I also want to gently point out: we all saw this coming. We've been saying this was coming. For years. And brands kept building their entire digital presence on Facebook anyway.
The lesson is ancient and simple: never build your most important thing on someone else's platform. Facebook isn't a public utility. It's a private company that makes money by selling access to its users. Of course they were eventually going to make brands pay for the access they'd been giving away free. That's just business.
The lesson is ancient and simple: never build your most important thing on someone else's platform.
The brands panicking right now are the ones who treated Facebook followers like an owned audience. They're not. They never were. Facebook rented you access to those people and now the rent went up. The brands who'd been treating social as a complement to owned channels (email lists, website traffic, actual customer databases) are fine.
I'm watching agencies scramble to pivot their clients, and I want to be compassionate, but also: we at Nemo have been pushing owned-channel strategy for two years specifically because this was inevitable. The clients who listened are calm. The ones who didn't are calling emergency meetings.
Every platform shift teaches the same lesson: own your audience, own your data, own your relationship with your customer. Rented audiences are borrowed time. The rent always goes up.