Facebook launched another update, and it seems that social media users either love it or hate it with a burning passion. Introduction of Facebook’s Explore Feed has polarized users from around the globe and made us ask one very important question: “Is this the end of Organic Reach for brand content?”

What is 'Explore Feed'?

Earlier this month, Facebook launched a new option called Explore Feed that groups all the posts coming from liked or followed pages in one place. This way all the posts published by your friends will be accessed from the regular News Feed, while all the funny memes and brand page posts are moved to a completely new tab.

The new option is fairly easy to find on a desktop version of Facebook, while being significantly more difficult to find on mobile devices.

How does this affect me?

This might not seem like that big of a deal to a regular user and many of them are applauding the change. The update is pretty useful for regular users, since it makes the interface more simple and gives more control to the users. But if you are the owner of a small business, a content creator managing your own page, or just an admin for a Facebook page, this isn't good news. It will certainly make you shake your head in disapproval.

Explore Feed is a part of an isolated test running in six countries: Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia.

Only a couple of days after its introduction, brand pages in these countries reported that the organic reach of their content was down significantly. In Slovakia, where this new test is under way, a journalist wrote on Medium that organic reach for publishers fell by “two-thirds” after Facebook moved Page posts to the Explore Feed.

Brand pages in these countries are affected so much that they are already trying to find different ways of reaching their audiences without spending even more money on advertising.

What does Facebook plan for the future?

Even though Explore Feed is only a test that affected a small number of countries at the moment, Facebook users have the right to be cautious about future updates.

With every year that passes it seems that content creators have more trouble reaching their audiences without chipping in a few extra dollars to promote their posts.

With the Explore Feed currently being in test mode, it's unlikely the update will be released to the rest of the world anytime soon. Facebook executive Adam Mosseri, who oversees News Feed, shed a little more light on the test in Facebook's blog to reiterate that the company still hasn’t decided if it will expand the two-feed test to everyone — and all publishers. “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” he wrote. “We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further.

There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore.”

Unfortunately, the countries that have been chosen as test subjects will have to learn to live with these changes for the time being and attempt to reach their followers in new ways.

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