Facebook to cut unpaid posts by marketers on news feeds

SAN FRANCISCO » Facebook told marketers Friday that if they really wanted to reach its customers on its website, they needed to buy an ad.

The social network announced that starting in January, it would reduce the number of posts made by brand pages, such as pitches to install a new mobile app or tune into a TV show, that appear in the news feeds of its 1.35 billion global users. That is likely to mean that fewer fans of a retailer will see its notice about a big sale and fewer fans of a video game company will see a post promoting its latest app.

Unpaid posts will drop out of the news feed even for big advertisers that spend millions of dollars on Facebook ads.

But Facebook, which dominates social media advertising the way Google dominates search, has so much power they don’t have much choice but to switch to paid ads.

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