Big news in the world of social media marketing today: Facebook announced the end of fan-gates in Page apps on their Developer Blog yesterday! This means that a Facebook user can no longer be forced to like a page to access an application or a contest on the page.
Applications that already use this feature will lose it on November 5, 2014. However, any new application created since today will not be able to use the like-gate feature.
This news comes as a surprise to many people, as it was a very popular strategy for building a community on a Facebook page. We saw a lot of promotions, contests and applications offering prizes and exclusive content in exchange for a simple like on Facebook. It was interesting for fans who received prizes for free and for brands who increased their communities in order to have more reach.
Facebook claims the reason for the change is to improve the quality of connections by ensuring a fan follows a page because they really like it instead of following it because of an artificial incentive.
Yeah... It's a beautiful sentence, however it comes on top of the decrease in the organic reach of Facebook page publications which reach on average, today, around 5% of the page's fans.
The real reason, in my opinion, is that Facebook wants brands to depend on advertising to grow their community and reach people. It's understandable since their revenue comes mainly from advertising, but it's still a shame to remove effective features that are not very intrusive.
That being said, the situation is what it is. We now need to be able to adapt and be creative in order to overcome this change and find new creative ways to engage people via Facebook.
And you, what is your opinion? Does this affect your fan acquisition strategy?
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