New Facebook Rules Are Anti-Small Business: http://tinyurl.com/l37d82g

Small-business owners will soon get less benefit from the unpaid marketing pitches they post on Facebook. That’s because, as of mid-January, the social network will intensify its efforts to filter out unpaid promotional material in user news feeds that businesses have posted as status updates.

Facebook’s push toward paid advertising is likely to aggravate an “already tense relationship between small businesses and social platforms over audience ownership,” says Steven Jacobs of Street Fight, a Colorado-based media-and-events firm covering local digital marketing. Businesses used to own their consumer relationships through email or other in-house marketing channels, or to buy them from newspapers, television and other traditional media outlets through ads. “But Yelp and now Facebook are trying to peddle a third model, he says: “renting—in which a business can build a community but never own an audience on a platform.”

The change will make it more difficult for entrepreneurs to reach fans of their Facebook pages with marketing posts that aren’t paid advertising.

Businesses that post free marketing pitches or reuse content from existing ads will suffer “a significant decrease in distribution,” Facebook warned in a post earlier this month announcing the coming change.

Analysts at Forrester Research said in a report released Monday that posts by well-known brands on Facebook reach only about 2% of their fans and followers, while on average fewer than 0.1% of people interact with each post. The researchers didn’t specifically measure the average reach of smaller brands’ Facebook posts.

Todd Bairstow, a partner at online-marketing firm Keyword Connects, says a strategy of attracting fans and “likes” on Facebook using unpaid posts in order to market to them later “ultimately failed for almost everyone we know.”

Mr. Bairstow, who represents about 350 small-business clients, says that advertising options on Facebook have improved in recent years, “but it was at the expense of small companies that spent a lot of time investing in and engaging their audience” by posting frequent status updates or messages on their firms’ Facebook pages.

Christine Lynch says she has spent $6,000 so far this year to boost Facebook posts about Women Owned Business Club, her Long Island, N.Y., service, which charges a membership fee and uses social media to promote the businesses of its 450 members. That’s up from about $2,000 in 2013, when, she says, the reach of unpaid posts “all of a sudden went way down.” About 80% of the service’s business comes through its Facebook page, which currently has 11,774 “likes.”

“If you’re not paying for it now, no one’s going to see it,” Ms. Lynch says, explaining her current view of marketing on Facebook.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs say they will monitor the social network and compare its value to that of other online advertising options as they experiment to find the best business results.

Justin Draplin, co-founder of Superfly Kids, a Livonia, Mich., maker of custom superhero capes, “No one is searching Facebook for superhero capes,” he notes.

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